50 of 50 items
Move Northgate off ad-hoc personal AI accounts and onto a governed business setup with a data processing agreement, scheduled automations that run without anyone typing a prompt, structured training, and a shared prompt library. Nothing else on this list is safe to build until this is done.
Data accessMicrosoft 365 and AI vendor admin only. No property system access required.
| # | Opportunity | Who | Systems | Numbers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DIS-03 | Three people are paying for AI out of their own pocket.Adoption is already happening informally, on personal consumer accounts, with no policy, no shared prompts and no visibility of what client data is being pasted where.
“I know at least three of them are paying for it themselves. I have no idea what they are putting into it.” |
Ray Ellison Managing Director |
Consumer AI tools, Microsoft 365 | 3 known personal subscriptions0 governed seats |
| DIS-07 | Without a data processing agreement, client data has to stay out.Tenant, landlord and leaseholder data cannot lawfully go through a consumer AI account, which rules out most of what people actually want to use it for. A business tier with a DPA closes the gap.
From discovery session notes, 4 September. |
Ray Ellison Managing Director |
Consumer AI tools, Microsoft 365 | - |
| DIS-11 | Nothing runs unless somebody remembers to run it.The few genuinely useful things people have worked out are prompts typed by hand. There is no scheduling, so a weekly report only happens in the weeks that person is in the office.
“It is brilliant, but it only happens when I am here.” |
Priya Venkatesan Finance Director |
Consumer AI tools | 0 scheduled automations |
| DIS-14 | Nobody has been trained, so results vary enormously.The handful of people who taught themselves get good output. Everyone else tried once, got a poor answer, and concluded it does not work for their job.
“Half the office thinks it is magic and half thinks it is useless. They are using the same tool.” |
Ray Ellison Managing Director |
n/a (organisational) | 0 hours formal training to date |
| DIS-16 | The board wants to see it work before it funds it.Appetite splits by department rather than by seniority. Early, visible wins in one team are what unlocks budget for the rest.
From discovery session notes, 4 September. |
Ray Ellison Managing Director |
n/a (organisational) | - |
Take the inbound repair queue - Fixflo, email and phone - and triage, prioritise and dispatch it automatically, with the helpdesk approving rather than sorting. Add automatic contractor chase-up and a status the tenant can see without ringing.
FlaggedRaised at discovery as the single most visible daily grind.
Data accessFixflo (existing API), Outlook, and Qube via file export. No new vendor contracts needed.
| # | Opportunity | Who | Systems | Numbers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FM-02 | Every repair report is read by a human before anything happens.Around 120 reports a week arrive through Fixflo, email and the phone. Each is read, categorised, matched to a property and assigned before a contractor is contacted.
“The first hour of my day is just reading them and deciding who gets what.” |
Gary Hobbs Facilities Manager |
Fixflo, Outlook | ~120 reports/week~1 hr/day triage |
| FM-05 | Emergency, urgent and routine sit in the same queue.Priority is decided by whoever opens the report, in the order things arrive, so a genuine leak can queue behind a dripping tap.
“It depends entirely who picks it up and what mood the day is in.” |
Ola Adeyemi Maintenance Helpdesk |
Fixflo | - |
| FM-09 | Contractors are chased by phone, or not at all.There is no automatic follow-up on an issued works order, so a job with no update simply sits until the tenant complains.
“Nothing chases them. I chase them, when I remember.” |
Gary Hobbs Facilities Manager |
Fixflo, Outlook, phone | 31% of jobs open >30 days |
| FM-12 | Tenants ring to ask where their repair has got to.A large slice of the helpdesk day goes on answering “what is happening with my job”, because there is no status the tenant can see.
“If they could just see it, half my calls would go away.” |
Ola Adeyemi Maintenance Helpdesk |
Phone, Fixflo | ~40 status calls/week |
| FM-15 | The same flat generates the same repair three times a year.Nothing links repeat jobs at an address, so a recurring fault gets patched again rather than escalated to a proper fix.
“We have replaced that same extractor fan three times. Nobody joined it up.” |
Gary Hobbs Facilities Manager |
Fixflo | - |
| PM-08 | Repair jobs are re-keyed from Fixflo into Qube.Work raised in Fixflo has to be entered a second time in Qube for the works order and the eventual invoice to reconcile against the property.
“Two systems, same job, typed twice.” Raised in 2 sessions |
Aaron Whitlock Property Manager |
Fixflo, MRI Qube | ~120 duplicate entries/week |
| FM-18 | Out-of-hours calls come back as a morning email.The overnight answering service emails a free-text summary each morning, which is read and re-entered into Fixflo by hand.
“It is a paragraph of someone else's notes. I retype all of it.” |
Ola Adeyemi Maintenance Helpdesk |
Answering service, Outlook, Fixflo | ~15 calls/week |
Replace the compliance spreadsheet with a live register that reads certificates as they arrive, extracts the expiry and the remedial actions, books the renewal ahead of time and shows the true portfolio position at any moment.
FlaggedSingle-person dependency. Flagged as the highest-risk item in the audit.
Data accessOutlook and SharePoint for certificate capture; Qube for the property register. No vendor API required.
| # | Opportunity | Who | Systems | Numbers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DEV-03 | Certificate expiry lives in a spreadsheet maintained by hand.Gas safety, EICR, EPC, fire risk assessments and legionella assessments are all tracked in one workbook. If it is not updated, nothing anywhere flags that a certificate has lapsed.
“If I got hit by a bus, that spreadsheet is the compliance function.” |
Ian Coutts Compliance Officer |
Excel, SharePoint | 1 workbook, ~1,400 rows1 person |
| DEV-06 | Certificates arrive as email attachments and are filed by hand.Each certificate is opened, the expiry read off it, the row updated, the PDF renamed and dropped into the property folder.
“Open it, read the date, type the date, rename it, file it. Every time.” |
Ian Coutts Compliance Officer |
Outlook, SharePoint, Excel | ~90 certificates/month~4 min each |
| DEV-09 | Nobody can state the portfolio compliance position on demand.Answering “are we compliant” means filtering the workbook and trusting that it is current, which is why the honest answer is always a qualified one.
“I can tell you what the spreadsheet says. That is not quite the same question.” |
Ian Coutts Compliance Officer |
Excel | 0 live view |
| DEV-12 | Chasing contractors for certificates is a manual monthly job.The work is often done on time; the paperwork arrives late, and only after somebody emails to ask for it.
“The job got done in March. I got the certificate in June.” |
Ian Coutts Compliance Officer |
Outlook | - |
| PM-14 | Fire risk assessment actions are tracked separately from the assessment.The remedial actions sit inside the FRA PDF. Getting them into a task list is a manual extraction, and on the smaller schemes it does not always happen.
“The actions are on page nine of a forty page PDF. Somebody has to go and get them.” Raised in 2 sessions |
Fiona Marsh Head of Property Management |
SharePoint, Excel | 34 schemes |
| DEV-15 | Renewals get booked after the certificate has already lapsed.Because the prompt is a spreadsheet somebody looks at, renewals are reactive. The gap is usually short, but it is a gap.
“Nine of them lapsed last year. None for long, but nine is nine.” |
Ian Coutts Compliance Officer |
Excel, Outlook | 9 gas certificates lapsed in 12 months |
Automate the arrears cycle end to end: match receipts across the three bank accounts, reconcile the two systems that disagree, draft the chase at each stage of a defined escalation ladder, and put the position in front of the property manager before it becomes serious.
Data accessBank statement feeds, MRI Qube and Alto via export. Existing logins; no new vendor API.
| # | Opportunity | Who | Systems | Numbers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FIN-02 | Arrears chasing is a Tuesday morning ritual.A report is run, read line by line, and individual emails are written from scratch to each tenant in arrears.
“Tuesday is arrears. All of Tuesday.” |
Ruth Kavanagh Client Accountant |
MRI Qube, Outlook | ~1 day/week~55 chases/week |
| FIN-05 | Rent arrives across three bank accounts and is matched by eye.Receipts are matched to tenancies manually, and references are frequently wrong or missing, so the match is a judgement call.
“Half of them put their own name and nothing else. You just have to know.” |
Ruth Kavanagh Client Accountant |
Bank portals, MRI Qube | ~380 receipts/month |
| FIN-08 | Two systems disagree about who is in arrears.Alto and Qube hold overlapping tenancy data that drifts apart, and the reconciliation between them is manual and periodic rather than continuous.
“Whichever one you open first, that is the number you believe.” |
Ruth Kavanagh Client Accountant |
Alto, MRI Qube | - |
| FIN-11 | Escalation depends on somebody remembering.There is no automatic ladder from reminder to formal letter to notice; each step happens when a person decides it is time.
“There is a process. It lives in my head.” |
Ruth Kavanagh Client Accountant |
MRI Qube, Word | - |
| PM-19 | Property managers do not see arrears until they are serious.Finance holds the arrears position and property management holds the relationship, and the two only meet once the number is big enough to escalate.
“By the time it reaches me it is three months and a conversation nobody wants.” Raised in 2 sessions |
Fiona Marsh Head of Property Management |
MRI Qube | - |
| FIN-14 | Landlord statements go out late when arrears are messy.Month-end statements wait on the receipts being matched, so a difficult month pushes every landlord statement back with it.
“Clean month, three days. Bad month, the best part of a week.” |
Ruth Kavanagh Client Accountant |
MRI Qube | 4-6 working days after month end |
Collapse offer-to-move-in into one flow: capture the tenant once, push those details into every downstream system, chase referencing automatically, generate the tenancy agreement and the move-in pack, and hold the Right to Rent evidence in one auditable place.
Data accessAlto and Goodlord APIs (both available on the existing plans), plus SharePoint.
| # | Opportunity | Who | Systems | Numbers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LET-02 | The same tenant details are typed into four systems.Alto, the referencing provider, the tenancy agreement and the inventory booking each need the same name, date of birth, address history and employment details, entered separately.
“I have typed that man's name and date of birth four times this morning.” |
Immy Clarke Lettings Negotiator |
Alto, Goodlord, Word, inventory provider | 4 systems~25 min/tenancy |
| LET-05 | Referencing chase-up is entirely manual.Nothing prompts when a reference has stalled, so the delay is only noticed when somebody asks how the tenancy is progressing.
“You find out it is stuck because the landlord rings you, not because the system told you.” |
Immy Clarke Lettings Negotiator |
Goodlord, Outlook | avg 6.5 days offer to referenced |
| LET-08 | Tenancy agreements are built from a Word template and checked by hand.Clauses are added and removed per tenancy, and the check that the right ones survived is a person reading it.
“It is find and replace, and then you read it twice and hope.” |
Danny Okafor Head of Lettings |
Word, SharePoint | ~18 tenancies/month |
| LET-11 | Move-in packs are assembled per tenancy from scratch.Certificates, the how-to-rent guide, deposit prescribed information and the property-specific notes are gathered individually each time.
“Six attachments, and if you miss one you find out on move-in day.” |
Immy Clarke Lettings Negotiator |
SharePoint, Outlook | ~20 min/tenancy |
| LET-14 | Right to Rent checks are done, but the evidence is scattered.The check happens reliably. Producing the evidence trail for a given tenancy afterwards means going to look for it.
“We always do it. Proving we did it is the awkward bit.” |
Danny Okafor Head of Lettings |
SharePoint, Alto | - |
| LET-17 | Renewals are missed because nobody is watching the dates.Tenancies roll to periodic by accident rather than by decision, which costs a renewal fee and removes a natural review point.
“Eleven of them went periodic last year and not one of those was a decision.” |
Danny Okafor Head of Lettings |
Alto | 11 unintentional periodic rollovers |
Rebuild the annual service charge cycle around the data rather than the spreadsheet: draft budgets from prior-year actuals and known contracts, hold apportionments in the system, assemble year-end packs automatically, and answer leaseholder queries from a source rather than a search.
FlaggedDownstream of the data layer. Do not start before project 08.
Data accessMRI Qube client accounting, plus the historic Excel workbooks. Depends on Portfolio Memory for the document side.
| # | Opportunity | Who | Systems | Numbers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FIN-17 | Service charge budgets are rebuilt in Excel every year.Each scheme gets a fresh workbook based on last year's, adjusted by hand against known contract uplifts and recent actuals.
“Thirty-four schemes, thirty-four spreadsheets, every single year.” |
Priya Venkatesan Finance Director |
Excel, MRI Qube | 34 schemes~3 weeks elapsed |
| FIN-20 | Year-end packs are assembled by hand from four sources.Accounts, invoices, the budget workbook and the certification correspondence are pulled together manually for each scheme.
“It is four places and a lot of copying.” |
Dev Sharma Purchase Ledger |
MRI Qube, Excel, SharePoint | 34 packs/year |
| FIN-23 | Apportionment schedules live outside the system.The percentages that decide who pays what sit in spreadsheets, so a change has to be applied in two places and occasionally is not.
“The lease says one thing, the spreadsheet says another, and you have to work out which is right.” |
Priya Venkatesan Finance Director |
Excel, MRI Qube | - |
| PM-22 | Leaseholder service charge queries take days to answer.Answering “what is this charge” means going back to the invoice, the budget and often the lease, which is a research job rather than a lookup.
“It is never a five minute answer. It is always half an afternoon.” |
Beth Nkemelu Property Management Assistant |
MRI Qube, SharePoint, Excel | ~25 queries/month |
| FIN-26 | Year-end accruals depend on one person's memory.Knowing which works were committed but not invoiced at year end is knowledge rather than data.
“I know what is coming because I have been here nine years.” |
Priya Venkatesan Finance Director |
MRI Qube | - |
Draft particulars from the property record and the surveyor's notes, prepare and push to every portal from one place, sort and rename the media automatically, match applicants against new stock, and acknowledge out-of-hours enquiries properly rather than leaving them until morning.
Data accessAlto API, Rightmove and Zoopla feeds via the existing agency plan.
| # | Opportunity | Who | Systems | Numbers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LET-20 | Particulars are written from scratch for every instruction.The facts already exist on the property record. The description is written fresh each time, then re-read for compliance wording.
“Everything I am typing is already on the screen next to me.” |
Tom Beresford Sales Manager |
Alto, Word | ~45 min/listing~18 listings/month |
| LET-23 | The same property is listed manually on each portal.Copy is adjusted per portal and uploaded separately, and corrections have to be made in each place.
“You fix a typo three times or you fix it once and forget the other two.” |
Tom Beresford Sales Manager |
Rightmove, Zoopla, Alto | 3 destinations per listing |
| LET-26 | Photographs and floorplans are chased and renamed by hand.Media arrives by email or a file link, gets renamed to the house convention, and is uploaded individually.
“It arrives as IMG_4471 and it has to become something a human can read.” |
Immy Clarke Lettings Negotiator |
Outlook, Alto, SharePoint | ~15 files/listing |
| LET-29 | Applicant matching is done from memory.New stock is matched to registered applicants by whoever remembers who was looking for what, so good matches depend on who is in that day.
“I know my applicants. If I am on holiday, nobody knows my applicants.” |
Tom Beresford Sales Manager |
Alto | - |
| LET-32 | Out-of-hours enquiries wait until the morning.A significant share of portal enquiries arrive in the evening and at the weekend, and the first response is the next working morning.
“The good ones have booked with somebody else by nine.” |
Danny Okafor Head of Lettings |
Rightmove, Zoopla, Outlook | 38% of enquiries outside office hours |
The gating project. Pull documents and correspondence out of SharePoint, the legacy Dropbox and Qube into one searchable layer, so that a lease question, a handover, or a historic dispute can be answered from a source rather than from whoever was here at the time.
FlaggedMost of projects 06, 07 and 09 sit downstream of this. Sequence it first.
Data accessSharePoint and Dropbox (existing tenancies), MRI Qube document store. No third-party vendor dependency.
| # | Opportunity | Who | Systems | Numbers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PM-02 | Documents live in three places depending on when they were filed.SharePoint holds recent files, a legacy Dropbox holds everything before the 2022 migration, and Qube holds some property documents. Which one has the file depends on the year and the person.
“It depends who filed it and what year it was.” |
Fiona Marsh Head of Property Management |
SharePoint, Dropbox, MRI Qube | 3 document stores |
| PM-05 | No lease question can be answered without opening the lease.Repairing obligation, alienation, service charge apportionment - all of it is read out of the PDF each time it is asked.
“Every single time, somebody opens a hundred page lease to answer one question.” |
Aaron Whitlock Property Manager |
SharePoint, MRI Qube | - |
| PM-11 | Handover between property managers loses context.The files transfer. The history of why a landlord was handled a particular way does not.
“You inherit the folder. You do not inherit the story.” |
Fiona Marsh Head of Property Management |
SharePoint | 3 portfolio changes last year |
| PM-16 | Historic correspondence is effectively unsearchable.Email threads sit in individual mailboxes rather than against the property, so reconstructing a dispute means asking people to search their own inbox.
“It is in somebody's Outlook. That is the best answer I can give you.” |
Beth Nkemelu Property Management Assistant |
Outlook | - |
| DIS-19 | The legacy Dropbox has never been audited.Nobody currently at Northgate knows with confidence what is in it, whether it duplicates SharePoint, or whether anything in it is the only copy.
“It is nine years of files and an act of faith.” Raised in 2 sessions |
Ray Ellison Managing Director |
Dropbox | ~9 years of files |
| PM-25 | Site visit notes are written up from memory that evening.Notes are taken on a phone or on paper during the visit and typed up later, which is when the detail goes.
“By seven o'clock you are writing down what you think you saw.” |
Aaron Whitlock Property Manager |
Phone, Word, SharePoint | ~12 visits/week |
One live view of the business: pipeline, arrears, compliance position, open works and portfolio value, drawn from the systems rather than assembled by hand each month. Entirely downstream of the data layer - worth doing, worth doing last.
FlaggedDownstream of projects 04, 06 and 08. Do not start it early.
Data accessReads from every other project. Builds nothing new of its own.
| # | Opportunity | Who | Systems | Numbers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DIS-22 | There is no single view of the business.Pipeline, arrears, compliance and open works each live in a different system, so board reporting is assembled by hand every month.
“Two days a month, and by the time it is finished it is already out of date.” |
Ray Ellison Managing Director |
Alto, MRI Qube, Fixflo, Excel | ~2 days/month |
| DIS-25 | Nobody can say what the portfolio is worth today.Values are held per scheme and updated at different times, so the group number is a reconstruction rather than a figure.
“I could get you a number by Friday. I could not get you one now.” |
Ray Ellison Managing Director |
MRI Qube, Excel | - |
| FIN-29 | Management accounts arrive three weeks after month end.By the time the numbers are in front of the board, the month they describe is well gone.
“We are always managing the month before last.” |
Priya Venkatesan Finance Director |
Sage 50, MRI Qube | 15-20 working days |
| DIS-28 | Every department measures itself differently.There is no shared definition of a live deal, an open job or an arrears case, so departmental numbers cannot be added together.
“Lettings and finance both told me the pipeline. They were not the same pipeline.” |
Ray Ellison Managing Director |
n/a (organisational) | - |
Nothing matches that search.
The interview schedule
| Discovery | 4 Sep · Ray Ellison, Priya Venkatesan |
| Sales & Lettings | 11 Sep · Danny Okafor, Immy Clarke, Tom Beresford |
| Property Management | 11 Sep · Fiona Marsh, Aaron Whitlock, Beth Nkemelu |
| Facilities & Helpdesk | 12 Sep · Gary Hobbs, Ola Adeyemi |
| Finance & Client Accounting | 12 Sep · Priya Venkatesan, Ruth Kavanagh, Dev Sharma |
| Development & Compliance | 15 Sep · Nadia Rahman, Ian Coutts |
Out of scope, deliberately
- Replacing Alto or Qube. A system migration is not an AI project, and both systems hold their data acceptably. The problem is what sits between them, not either of them.
- Automated valuations. Regulated advice with a professional liability attached. A machine can assemble the evidence; a person signs the number.
- A tenant-facing chatbot. Rejected in the Property Management session, and rightly. The human touchpoint is what generates the referrals - automate the queue behind it, not the conversation.
- Contractor selection on price. Choosing who does the work is a commercial and relationship judgement. The system should surface the data and stop there.