Case study
A platform that chases what block managers owe their suppliers
Block Debt chases unpaid invoices for the contractors and maintenance companies that work for block managers. We built the platform behind it: invoices arrive from Xero and email, staged workflows generate every reminder, and the day's emails are approved in one pass.
2024–today
What we built
- Staged reminder workflows for each supplier
- Bulk approval of the day's emails
- Invoice import from Xero and email
- Invoice numbers read from remittance advices
- One master record per managing agent
- Pause, resume and hold controls
The challenge
Contractors and maintenance companies that work for block managers are owed a great deal of money. Chasing it means tracking every invoice's due date, writing to the right accounts-payable contact for each block, and following up again once the invoice falls overdue. Block Debt was set up to do that chasing on suppliers' behalf. It needed a platform that could run the process for many suppliers at once, on invoice data in which the same managing agent can appear under several names and contacts.
What we did
- August 2024 — the first phase modelled the business: suppliers and their trading companies, blocks as debtors, and a staged email workflow for each supplier
- December 2024 to February 2025 — reminders that regenerate when an invoice changes, and workflows that can be paused and resumed
- February to April 2025 — invoices imported from Xero and from email, with invoice numbers read from remittance advices so payments can be matched
- March to July 2025 — one master record per managing agent, built by fuzzy-matching the many spellings and contacts that arrive in suppliers' accounts
- 2026 — an AI agent that replies to incoming email, now in trial
What we built
Each supplier is set up as a company, with its trading entities as creditors. The blocks that owe money are debtors, each linked to its managing agent's accounts-payable contact. When an invoice is created or imported, the platform fills in every email in that supplier's workflow, such as a reminder three days before the due date and an overdue notice seven days after, and queues them for approval.
The result
Block Debt runs its chasing on the platform. Due-soon reminders, due-today notices and second demands go out on each supplier's schedule without anyone writing them, and the team's time goes on approving the queue and handling the exceptions, such as invoices on hold and pro formas. An AI agent that replies to incoming email is now in trial to take on more of the inbox.
- Laravel Nova
- Xero
- n8n