Building Document Portal.

A UK commercial property managing agent looks after a portfolio of multi-let office buildings in London, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Edinburgh. Every building produces a steady stream of documents that tenants are entitled to see: service charge budgets and reconciliations, utility and VAT invoices, fire risk assessments and other health & safety reports, newsletters, occupier handbooks and fit-out guides.

Those documents were being sent by email, one tenant at a time. Surveyors spent hours answering “can you resend the reconciliation?”, tenants who had moved out still sat on distribution lists, and nobody could say who had actually seen a fire risk assessment. The agent wanted one secure place where each tenant sees exactly the documents for their building, floor and lease period — and nothing else.

We started from the agent's discovery notes and turned them into a working web portal — following the same discovery-first approach we use on every build. The aim was to let surveyors, partners and a couple of friendly tenants use the real journeys and argue about the details while changes were still cheap.

Three decisions shaped the design:

• Access follows the lease, not the person. A tenant is registered against a building, floor and unit with a lease start and end, and only sees documents inside that window — so a new occupier never sees a predecessor's invoices.
• The property manager stays the gatekeeper. Tenants self-register, but nothing is visible until the surveyor responsible for that building approves the request — they recognise the company and its email domain.
• Filing has to be boring. Periodic documents (invoices, utilities, VAT) are filed by year and month; everything else by year. A single upload can cover a range of periods, so a back-catalogue of invoices goes in in one go.

For tenants

• Self-registration for an organisation against a building, floor and unit, with the building picked from an autocomplete list.
• Sign-in with email two-factor authentication, so access stays tied to the company inbox.
• “My Documents”: a folder view by category, year and month, limited to the tenant's own lease period.
• Building announcements and a “My Tenancy” page showing the lease details and the responsible property manager.

For property managers

• A dashboard with registrations awaiting approval, tenants flagged as inactive and recent document activity.
• One-click approve or reject, with the applicant notified by email.
• Bulk upload with category and period, plus a document browser filtered by building and by tenant — so a surveyor sees exactly what a given tenant sees.
• Tenant management: accounts with no sign-in for six months are flagged for deactivation, and former tenants move to an archive instead of being deleted.
• Building-wide announcements (fire alarm tests, lift maintenance, newsletters) that email every tenant in the building.
• Editable document categories, including removing VAT invoices for buildings that are not VAT-registered.

For the super admin

• A portfolio overview with properties still waiting for a manager.
• Property set-up with floors and lettable units, and assignment or reassignment of the responsible property manager.
• Property manager accounts with email invites and per-building access.
• One-click Excel reports: all tenants, inactive users and a documents summary by property and category.

The outcome is a portal covering all three roles end to end — registration and approval, two-factor sign-in, the document archive, announcements, inactivity flagging and reporting. It gave the agent something concrete to put in front of surveyors and tenants, and a shared picture of scope for the next releases.

Every building, address, company and person in the screenshots has been changed to protect the client.