A property developer managed the journey from a buyer’s first enquiry to their final instalment across spreadsheets, email threads and a few people’s memories. Sales tracked enquiries and bookings in one place, finance tracked instalments in another, and the link between them was a person who happened to know both. When a buyer called with a question about their payment schedule, or finance needed to chase an overdue instalment, the answer meant assembling fragments from several sources and hoping none was out of date.
A real estate deal is long and has many moving parts — unit selection, booking, a contract, a schedule of payments tied to construction stages, and eventually handover. Spread across disconnected tools, the full picture of a single deal existed nowhere, and that made both buyer service and cash-flow visibility harder than they needed to be.
The challenges we had to solve
- A deal’s history was fragmented across sales spreadsheets, finance sheets and inboxes, with no single thread.
- Instalments were tied to construction milestones, so the schedule was not a fixed calendar but a set of triggers.
- Overdue payments were chased manually, which meant some were chased late and some were missed.
- Unit availability and finance needed to agree, so a booked unit could not still appear sellable.
How we approached it
We built the system around the deal as the single thread that everything attaches to: the enquiry, the unit, the contract, the payment schedule and every interaction along the way live against one record. Because instalments follow construction rather than the calendar, we modelled the schedule as milestone-driven, so reaching a stage raises the right invoices and surfaces what is now due. Sales and finance read from the same record, so a booked unit is no longer offered to the next walk-in.
We delivered in stages — enquiry and booking first, then the payment schedule and collections — so the sales team gained ground early while the finance side was built out. We added plain handling for overdue instalments so they are flagged and followed up on a rule rather than when someone remembers. On handover we documented the milestone logic and the schedule rules, since those are where a developer’s terms are most likely to change.
Where it stands
A buyer’s question is now answered from one record that holds their whole journey, rather than reassembled from scattered sheets. Finance can see what is due and what is overdue without building a report by hand each week, and a unit’s status is consistent between the people selling it and the people collecting on it. The deal, not the spreadsheet, is now the thing the business works from.