£50K recovered by making hidden maintenance work visible and billable

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. Jobs were missed, and jobs that were done were often not invoiced. 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

I built two tools 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.
• Linen Laura: linen counts captured at the clean, with stock orders calculated automatically and every clean shown to finance for invoicing.
• 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 and spreadsheets gone from both processes