Sixty apartments, one view of what needs fixing
Repairs came in by WhatsApp and were tracked in Excel, which worked until somebody needed to know what was still outstanding.
ResultsThe situation
A maintenance job started life as a WhatsApp message. Someone spotted a broken lock or a leaking tap, posted it to the group, and that was the record. Later, somebody copied it into a spreadsheet.
For the person reporting the job this worked perfectly well, which is why it had lasted. The cost sat entirely with the managers. A WhatsApp group is a stream, not a list, so anything not acted on quickly scrolled out of sight, and the only way to know whether something had been fixed was to ask the person who fixed it.
Across sixty units on two sites that meant no reliable view of what was outstanding at any moment. Managers spent their time chasing updates instead of running the business, and reporting was manual, inconsistent, or quietly did not happen.
What we built
We did not build an app. The team was already reporting jobs reliably by message, and asking a maintenance crew to stop doing what works and start filling in forms is how systems end up unused.
So we left the habit alone and changed what sits behind it. Jobs are still reported the same way, by the same people, in the same words. The one thing we asked for was a move from WhatsApp to Telegram, because software can work inside Telegram in ways it cannot inside WhatsApp. Everything else in the build follows from that.
- Jobs are logged and completed by sending a message, the same way the team already worked, with photos attached directly to the job.
- Every job lands in one database covering all sixty units across both properties, with the apartment attached from the start.
- Access runs at two levels: the team logs and completes work, managers see across all of it.
- Managers ask questions in plain language, at any time, and get an answer back immediately. What is still open at Fuentes de Nerja. Whether apartment 14 has been fixed. How many jobs closed this week.
- Managers are notified automatically whenever a job is logged and whenever one is completed.
- A full report arrives by email every Monday morning without anyone assembling it.
What changed
The question of what is outstanding no longer needs a person to answer it. It used to mean asking whoever last touched the job; now it is a question anyone can ask the system, and the answer comes back in seconds without interrupting anybody.
Nothing outstanding scrolls out of sight either. A job in a chat thread is only visible while it is recent, whereas a job in a database stays open until someone closes it.
Jobs stopped being missed. What is left is accountability, because an open job now sits against a name and a date rather than in a thread everyone has scrolled past, and a job nobody has completed is visible as exactly that.