Ruahine Property Works - An Admin Automation Portal Beside SimPro and Xero

Client Overview

Ruahine Property Works runs three trade brands, Ruahine, Mana and Garador, as cost centres in one Xero company. Jobs, quotes and timesheets live in SimPro, supplier invoices come in through their existing bills tool, and the vans are tracked in Argus. Each system does its own job well. The admin that sits between them was the problem.

The Challenge

An admin role had gone, and its work had landed on people who were already busy. Supplier statements were checked by hand once a month against a printed Xero ledger. Payroll hours were copied from SimPro onto paper and then keyed into Xero. Vehicle COF and service bookings relied on someone remembering. When hours on a job were queried, GPS reports were pulled from Argus and matched to SimPro by hand.

SimPro also could not answer some basic management questions, such as which jobs had cost on them and had not been billed, or how quotes were tracking by salesperson and brand.

The Approach

Rather than replace anything, we built a portal that sits beside SimPro, Xero and Argus, does the checking and chasing, and puts only the exceptions in front of a person. SimPro, Xero and the bills tool stay exactly as they were.

Everything started from a written specification with a numbered requirement for each thing the portal does, and a proposed default for every open business rule, so the team could confirm the rules in one sitting before each module began. A few firm boundaries came first:

• Nothing reaches a customer. The portal never emails or texts a customer.
• Read-only to Xero by design. The Xero connection was set up with read permission only.
• Light touch in SimPro. When switched on, it can only add tasks and notes to a job and close tasks it created itself. It never changes a job, quote, timesheet or invoice.
• A person still decides. Staff still sign off the pay run and enter any missing bill. Every automated match carries a confidence score, with a human fallback when the portal is unsure.

The Foundation

• Roles enforced on the server. Administrator, Office, Operations, Sales and Payroll. Cost, margin and payroll figures are removed before they leave the server for anyone whose role does not allow them, on screen and in email.
• A Today screen for every person. Tasks raised by the portal's own checks, by colleagues and from SimPro, with reminder emails and texts sent only between 7:00am and 6:00pm on working days.
• Rules the business owns. Thresholds such as how close a statement must be to Xero live in a Rules screen, not in code, so they can change without a developer.
• A full audit trail. Every create, approve, send, file and rule change is written to an append-only audit log, including what the portal did by itself and which rule caused it.
• Built to be retried. Every scheduled job is safe to run twice, so a retry never duplicates a task, a reminder or a booking request.

Supplier Statements in Practice

Supplier statements were the first module to go live. The portal watches the accounts mailboxes, including the folder statements get dragged into, and treats any PDF that looks like a statement as one. Claude reads the supplier name, GST number, dates, balances and every line, with a confidence score on each figure.

The supplier is matched to a Xero contact by a name or sender confirmed before, then GST number, then sender address, then name. The portal then works out what Xero says was owed on the statement date. A statement that is within tolerance and adds up is marked agreed, and its email is filed. One that does not agree shows the lines on the statement and not in Xero, the lines in Xero and not on the statement, and any amounts that differ.

When we checked a batch of September statements that did not agree, the balance the portal worked out matched Xero's own Aged Payables report to the cent on every one. That told the office the differences were between the supplier and Xero, not in the portal's copy.

Built With

A React progressive web app on AWS Amplify, with AWS Lambda behind an HTTP API, Amazon Cognito sign-in (with an authenticator app required for administrators), DynamoDB, S3, Step Functions, EventBridge Scheduler and SES, all in the Sydney region. Claude reads statements and drafts meeting minutes through the Anthropic API, Amazon Transcribe handles the meeting audio, and staff reminder texts go through our own SMS gateway. The portal connects to SimPro through its API at a polite rate, because the limit is shared with other tools, and to the accounts mailboxes through a Microsoft 365 app connection.

Where Things Stand

All six modules are built, independently reviewed and running in production behind their switches. Supplier statements are live. Reports, the Monday pack and payroll exceptions were switched on for checking, with figures reconciled against SimPro before the pack goes to the wider team. Fleet and GPS are waiting on Argus access, and the meeting recorder is waiting on the go-ahead and a phone to record on.

The work continues as the team uses it. After a run-through of the live portal, the office asked for clearer statement detail, quote totals by salesperson, a period picker on the quote reports and a Payroll away list, and those were built. A later change request added applying supplier credit notes to bills in Xero, with every list approved by a person before anything is written. Staff can also report a problem or ask for a change from inside the portal.

Conclusion

Ruahine Property Works did not need new software to run jobs. It needed the checking, chasing and reporting that fell between SimPro, Xero and Argus taken off the office. A portal that reads those systems, applies rules the business owns, and puts only the exceptions in front of a person does that without changing how the trades team works or anything a customer sees.