Live block finances for directors, from a system with no API

01The challenge

Eight Asset Management was a new managing agent, set up by industry veterans and running on Blockman. It wanted the directors and freeholders of its blocks to see live financial reporting, something that would set it apart when pitching for new business. Blockman had a leaseholder portal but no director reporting and no public API; its data came out as CSV, PDF or HTML, sometimes for one block and sometimes for all of them, and it allowed one login per account at a time.

02What we did

1. 01November 2020 — discovery with Eight, then a director portal designed around five Blockman reports, first fed by manual CSV uploads
2. 022021 — manual uploads proved too time-consuming, so we automated extraction by robotic process automation on headless Chrome and Symfony Panther
3. 032021 — CSV, PDF and HTML transformed into one format in PostgreSQL, filtered on the server to each director's block and refreshed on a schedule
4. 04August 2022 — with the portal live for several months, a projects board added for works on each development
5. 05October 2023 — a week observing Eight's team at work to plan the next automations on Blockman data

03What we built

• Block dashboard of key figures for directors
• Budget, bank, aged debtor and creditor reports
• Filter, sort, group, total and export to CSV
• Admin control of who sees which blocks
• Scheduled Blockman extraction by robotic process automation
• Projects board with magic-link email notifications

04The result

The portal went live and stayed in use: in August 2022, several months after launch, Eight commissioned a projects board for it, and once that had launched it asked for a health and safety module next. Each director sees only their own block, enforced on the server, and many directors can use the portal at the same time even though Blockman allows one login per account.