Managing forestry subsidies brings together a diverse set of users and data — not only spatially, but also digitally. Power users need the full flexibility of QGIS for advanced digitizing, while district foresters and private forest owners need simple, guided workflows that help them contribute high-quality data without being overwhelmed.

In the Canton of Zug (Switzerland), the cantonal forestry office developed a central platform that coordinates all access to the shared dataset. The platform is built on Django and exposes data through different endpoints — the web application via Django's own model and admin layer, QGIS via OGC API Features using the django-oapif library — but crucially, both share the same underlying business logic, user management, and permission model. Each user only sees and edits what they are authorized to, regardless of which client they use, and data quality rules are enforced once at the platform level rather than in each client individually.

Users can freely choose between the modern web application and QGIS depending on their needs. Authentication is handled uniformly for all users. Beyond the core workflow, the platform integrates data from surrounding systems and automatically generates PDF reports.

In this talk, we will walk through the architecture, the role QGIS plays as the power-user frontend, and the practical challenges we encountered bridging the gap between desktop GIS and web-based workflows over a shared platform. We will also give an outlook on upcoming improvements: Single Sign-On integration, rendering web forms directly inside QGIS, and our experiments with alternative geometry encodings to improve transfer performance of OGC API Features.