CastoWare Development

Our CFO and Data Analytics Lead, Margaret posted this on LinkedIn today:

I may be retired from health insurance, but I’m not done learning.

I’ve earned the Pre-Actuarial Foundations micro-credential from the Society of Actuaries. While I’ve stepped away from full-time corporate work, I now co-own CastoWare Development, and strong actuarial and analytical fundamentals still matter—for building good data products and making sound decisions.

I believe in staying current, staying credible, and continuing to learn.

🔗 Credential verification:

Pre-Actuarial Foundations Represents the skills required and ability needed to learn how to solve actuarial problems

🚀 Milestone unlocked for our LLC

As part of my role as CFO, we’ve now completed a key operational step: our company is officially banked and payment-ready.

This gives us the infrastructure needed to accept future customer payments and operate cleanly as our products approach the sales stage.

We’re actively building and refining:
• TidyTix
• Prism
• Address Intelligence Agent

Getting the financial rails in place early is intentional — it’s about being prepared, compliant, and ready to scale when demand hits.

Onward.

Check out the latest post on our LinkedIn page -

Margaret took time out of her busy schedule to present today at a university. | CastoWare Development Margaret took time out of her busy schedule to present today at a university.

We’re officially an LLC at CastoWare Development, and we’ve hit the ground running with three products in active development.

1. Prism by CastoWare – NPI Enriched Data Product
I’m building our first commercial data product: an enriched U.S. NPI registry with validated geographic coordinates, county attribution, and additional provider intelligence fields. This will be the foundation of our “Prism by CastoWare” informatics suite.
Target release: live on the Snowflake Marketplace by year-end.

2. Address Intelligence Agent
I’m also developing an address-standardization and matching tool powered by our own rulesets plus AI. This will allow organizations to join disparate datasets cleanly and reliably.
Target release: mid-February.

3. TidyTix (Mike’s Project)
Mike is working on TidyTix—a lightweight ticketing and registration system designed for one-time, annual, or recurring events. It’s built for small organizations that find the big platforms overpriced or overbuilt.
Across everything we build, our focus is simple: give organizations the data and tools they actually need at a price that makes sense.

You can follow CastoWare Development here on Facebook or on LinkedIn for progress updates and release announcements.

**🚀 Exciting News: Announcing TidyTix - Modern Ticketing & Box Office Management!**

I'm thrilled to share that we've started development on **TidyTix**, a comprehensive box office management system designed specifically for theaters, venues, and performance spaces!

**🎯 What we're building:**
- **Web Portal** for show management & box office operations
- **Dedicated Terminal** for door check-ins & walk-up sales
- **Offline-Capable** Electron app for unreliable venue WiFi
- **Manual Payment Focus** - because not every venue can use Stripe!
- **Multi-Venue Support** from day one

**💡 The Problem We're Solving:**
Many performance venues still rely on paper spreadsheets, cash boxes, and manual record-keeping. TidyTix brings modern software to spaces that need flexibility with payment processing and offline operation.

**🛠️ Tech Stack:**
- **Backend:** Laravel 12 + Sanctum API
- **Frontend:** Quasar/Vue3 (same codebase for web + desktop)
- **Desktop:** Electron for dedicated box office terminals
- **Database:** MySQL + SQLite for offline caching

**📅 Timeline:**
We're targeting a **testable web portal prototype by February 2026**! If you're involved with a theater, venue, or performance space and would be interested in early access testing, please drop a comment below or DM me!

**🎭 Special call-out to my theater friends:** This is born from real experience with community theater challenges. Think: board members manually processing PayPal payments, paper will-call lists, and cash reconciliation headaches.

Follow along as we build in public! Your feedback and insights would be incredibly valuable as we shape this platform.



---

**Want me to create any of these additional assets?**
- A shorter Twitter/X version
- A technical deep-dive post for developer audiences
- An email announcement for potential beta testers
- Visual mockups of the interface

See CastoWare Development’s activity on LinkedIn Sign in or join now to see posts like this one and more.

Our CFO & Data Analytics Lead, Margaret Westlake, posted this post on LinkedIn. Our team is always learning to better serve our clients, whether on our own by diving into projects and learning new languages and skills or by formal exams and certifications. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7395314291396218880

Yesterday, we hired a registered agent in Florida and filed to be an LLC. We needed this because we entered a startup competition at Snowflake for a data product and tool we are working on. We put together a plan for year end to get that to a demo state as well as having a product we can sell by year end. We are so excited to take our company to the next level. Margaret is leading this data effort while Mike stays busy servicing our web clients.

A bit of ancient history.

Way back in '97, Mike had developed a website for a client, and had a lot of personal experience in programming. He hadn't yet done it as a job, except that one website.

He got hired as a temp employee doing data entry in the "New Media" department at LM Berry Company in Dayton, OH.

The Berry Company was one of the largest publishers of Yellow Pages, and the "New Media" department would later evolve into the Online Yellow Pages.

The data entry job was tedious and error-prone. There were several markets, each with its own template. The templates were all very similar, but each market had its own fields.

They would open the plaintext template file, which was HTML, search for strings of " # # " (the fields) and replace those with the information that was supposed to be there.

Inevitably, when they switched markets, they forgot to fill in one or more fields that was different from the previous template they'd worked on.

While the job was tedious, Mike liked the people he was working with. The manager, Barry Sanders (not the one who played pro football), came to Mike and said, "After Thanksgiving break, we'll only need you for a couple more weeks."

Mike took one of those template files home and, over that long Thanksgiving weekend, put together an Access database with forms. It would save the data entered and generate the full HTML that could be uploaded to the server. If implemented, it would mean no more searching for fields or dealing directly with the HTML in the template. It would mean fewer errors, a better data entry experience, and a *lot* more productivity.

On Monday, he took that Access database in and showed it to Barry, who got *very* excited. He said, "If you can do *that*, maybe you can do *this*."

He'd been kicking around an idea in his head for a while that was basically what Mike had done, but it would be a web interface the data entry operators could use. Everything would be stored on the server, so there'd be no upload, and the HTML files would be output by the server-side application.

At the time, Mike's go-to programming tool was Visual Basic 5. He wasn't sure he could build what Barry envisioned, but he was confident he could figure it out, so he said, "Yes. I can build that."

Due to his budget, Barry couldn't hire Mike directly, but he *could* hire a contracting company.

So, CastoWare was born. Mike wrote that app in VB5 with an Access database and put the executable onto their intranet web server as a CGI. It produced the web forms for the data entry operators, stored the data, and generated the HTML pages on the public site for their advertisers.

Jack Poe, a graphic designer for Berry, designed the appearance of the pages.

In '98, that app won an award from the company. Jack & Mike were listed as the developers. That was the start of Mike's actual career as a web developer and the birth of CastoWare Development.