In short
Custom software to support client service tracking at AHOPE, designed for the front desk.
A point-of-sale style transaction layer that runs on tablets beside the regional HMIS, so staff can log a service in one tap and get back to the person in front of them.
At AHOPE Day Center in Asheville, about 250 people come through every day for mail, showers, lockers, and case management. Staff administer roughly 26,000 service transactions a year, and all of it was tracked on paper. AHOPE leadership felt the pressure, but couldn’t show evidence of how staff was working to respond. Aktiga designed and built a lightweight point-of-sale style transaction layer to run in parallel with the regional HMIS, on tablets.
About the client
Homeward Bound of WNC moves people from homelessness into permanent housing. AHOPE Day Center is often where that work starts: it’s where someone gets mail, a shower, a locker, and a conversation with a case manager. Before writing the RFP, AHOPE had already tried digital alternatives, but ran into usability reasons and reverted back to paper.
Seeing is believing
When the RFP came in, the first thing our director of Research and Design did was email the director and ask to come watch the front desk.
Here’s what a morning looks like. A staff member on a stool, flipping pages as people walk in. A volunteer working a tangle of cords and flip phones. Someone walks in and before they speak, “I got you,” and a mark on page four. Someone else walks past with no mark, and is gone from the count. And at the counter, a person in visible distress, being helped by the same person who is checking everyone else in.
That morning set the design brief. Simple is always the goal. It’s a different goal when the users are absorbing other people’s active trauma. Every second spent looking at a screen is a second spent away from the person at the counter.
The check-in screen. One tap per service, and a client’s identity stays hidden until a staff member chooses to reveal it. Sample data.
The human constraint we had to respect
Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is common among people experiencing homelessness. Memory, sequencing, and tolerance for multi-step forms are all affected, for clients and for the staff carrying the load. We designed every screen for one tap and one decision at a time.
We also learned the human consequences of incomplete records. Staff may know someone for ten years by a nickname before there is ever a record of them. Chronicity drives housing prioritization, so a person known to the staff for a decade can be known to the system since today. We made the product decision that street names are real names in this system, every client gets a unique AHOPE ID, and history starts the first time someone is seen.
Continuous discovery
April: First site visit
May to June: Kickoff, staff interviews, compliance review, data lifecycle mapping
June to August: Recurring in-person workshops at Aktiga’s office
Throughout: Desk research on WellSky, HMIS, HUD requirements, and point-of-sale patterns
The staff’s workarounds drove our product requirements. The mailroom’s lookup taught us to love “the speed of the no.” The locker room’s color-coded spreadsheet already tracked staleness. A yellow highlighter on the attendance list meant “assessment due.” When we asked whether check-in should alert the mailroom to pre-pull mail, staff turned it down: “It gives people agency to come ask.” We built around that.
The intake process as AHOPE had documented it, annotated on site.
The service blueprint that came out of it: every station, every paper list, every handoff.
What we didn’t replace
The system of record (HMIS) stays exactly as it is. We don’t read from it or write to it. The secure document vault was already compliant and already working, so we left it alone. The mailroom keeps its existing inventory tool. We built the missing piece: a low-barrier client record and a simple transaction layer that sits alongside all of it.
What we built
Attendance, mail transactions, lockers, showers, a follow-up action list, and reporting, all on one idea: everything is a service transaction. A person, a service, a timestamp. Every station shares the same fast check-in. Every list staff used to keep on paper is a live view of that log.
It’s held to the HMIS privacy bar even though it never touches HMIS: per-user accounts, row-level security, and audit trails on every look at a client’s identity. On volunteer-facing screens, sensitive information structurally can’t appear. It runs on a tablet, and if you’ve used a restaurant terminal, you can use it.
Staff sign in. Volunteers don’t: a tablet is set up once as a station, and what it can show is decided there.
Where it landed
After 5 months of close collaboration, we went live in September 2026. A month later, Homeward Bound’s CEO stood in front of a room of supporters and put the live reports on the screen: active clients, services, guests served per day. Numbers that used to live on page four of a binder.
Homeward Bound’s CEO sharing the AHOPE dashboard at a public event, October 2026.
Three things we’re taking with us
Pay attention to the culture.
Track the wishlist without getting attached to the exploration.
What we’ve started calling trickle-up data economics: reduce the headache around collecting the data, and the numbers start to tell the real story.
The work at AHOPE became the foundation for FlightPath, Aktiga’s service-tracking product for homeless service providers.
