The client challenge

Linden managed 2,400 units with a five-person back office and a spreadsheet for every gap between systems. Tenancy onboarding took eleven days and forty-one manual steps; contractor invoices were routinely paid late because approvals lived in someone's inbox.

Process Discovery

Three weeks of shadowing produced a map of what actually happens, not what the handbook claims.

• 41-step tenancy onboarding process documented end to end
• 17 spreadsheets identified as load-bearing infrastructure
• Volume and time-cost analysis to rank automation candidates by payback
• Compliance review of every step touching tenant data

Automation Roadmap

We sequenced by payback period and started with the process the team hated most.

• Nine workflows prioritised across three delivery waves
• Human approval retained wherever money or a legal document moves
• Single source of truth established in the property system
• Success defined per workflow before a line was built

Experience & Governance

Automations that fail silently are worse than manual work, so visibility came first.

• Exception dashboard showing every stalled run and its owner
• Slack alerts routed to the responsible person, not a shared channel
• Plain-English runbooks for each workflow
• Manual override on every automated path

Implementation

Orchestrated in n8n with typed custom nodes for the integrations that needed real logic.

• Two-way Xero sync with idempotent writes and reconciliation checks
• DocuSign envelope generation from templated tenancy packs
• Postgres event log for a complete audit trail
• Staged rollout with parallel manual running for two weeks per wave

What Runs Today

Nine workflows in production, monitored, owned internally and still expanding.

• Tenancy onboarding, deposit registration and compliance reminders
• Contractor onboarding, work orders and invoice approvals
• Monthly owner statements and arrears escalation