Aldeburgh Coastal Cottages
£50K recovered by making hidden maintenance work visible and billable
Two custom tools that made hidden work visible, got it billed, and removed a day of admin a week.
£50K
revenue recovered
1 day
saved every week
750
cleans tracked each month
The situation
A holiday cottage business with about 60 people and around £5M a year in turnover. The owner saw the maintenance team as a cost and could not see where its time went. Cleaners reported issues in a group WhatsApp chat, and maintenance picked the jobs up from there. Job details lived on paper, which may or may not have been completed, and may or may not have reached finance for invoicing. Linen counts were written on paper at each clean, then typed into one spreadsheet to order stock and another to invoice property owners.
What I did
Two builds around the people who would use them, many of whom did not like technology.
- Maintenance Molly: every maintenance job logged from report to fix, so all work is visible and billed.
- Aldeburgh then came back for a second, more complex build: going paperless on linen. Linen Laura tracks dirty linen as it leaves each property, digitises restocking, and invoices property owners for each clean type.
- Dashboards for both, including price tracking.
- Before go-live, the team ran paper and the new system side by side for a week. There was not one difference.
The result
- £50K of maintenance work recovered and billed
- 1 day of linen admin saved every week
- 0 errors in a week of side-by-side testing
- Paper, spreadsheets and WhatsApp gone from both processes
Why it worked
I fixed the process first, then built the tool around the people doing the work. The maintenance team went from a cost to a team that earns its keep. Aldeburgh came back for a more complex build, which says more than any pitch.
Losing money to manual work or unbilled jobs?
Send me your idea or your current workflow. I will reply within 24 hours with whether it is feasible, a rough cost, and whether you need custom code at all.