Role: Process Designer and Developer (Contract)
Client: (Client name changed for privacy.)
Industry: Residential Property Leasing
Year: 2024
Team Size: 14+ operational staff, 100+ contractors
Tools: Airtable, Softr, JotForm, Zapier
The operations team at this business realized their shared Excel spreadsheets could no longer work for managing over 100 independent contractors. Their manual processes were unsustainable, and weekly errors were costing them time and money. They needed someone to bring a better solution.
Because everyone agreed on the need for change, the project moved quickly. The VP contacted me in March 2024, ready to start, so we began work right away.
The two user groups for which the system was built.
To know what to build, it was important to first understand the main problems.
The firm evaluated residential apartment properties by sending contractors to conduct four types of assignments. E. calls to probe general property details, P. calls for more in-depth conversations, On-site tours to assess properties firsthand, and Web assessments to gather online information. The data the contractors collected fed into leasing scores that reflected each property’s true condition and market responsiveness. Getting that data right depended entirely on having the right contractors doing the appropriate jobs correctly and on time.
The job board was an Excel spreadsheet. When new jobs were posted, contractors received a text or email, and then picked jobs from the spreadsheet. But the sheet couldn’t enforce certain rules and restrictions. Contractors could claim jobs they weren’t certified for, skip required details, or take on conflicting assignments.
As a result, the operations team spent their days dealing with reviewing claims after the fact, catching unqualified contractors, chasing missing information, and reassigning jobs. They were constantly reacting to issues that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
The feedback and compensation process worsened it. Once an analyst reviewed a submitted assignment from a contractor and determined whether it passed, passed with coaching, or failed, someone had to manually compile that feedback, document the compensation status, and send it to the contractors. For every assignment. Across every property. For every contractor in the network. The volume alone made consistency almost impossible.
Tracking each job’s status from created, released, assigned, submitted, in review, analyzed, or closed meant opening the spreadsheet and searching manually every time.
What the contractor and operations experience looked like.
Before designing the system, I worked with the 12-person operations team to map out the entire workflow, which went from project initiation to contractor compensation and handoff, noting every stage where problems often occurred. I needed to understand where their manual effort was concentrated and why.
What came out of those sessions directed everything that followed. Two things in particular became clear. First, the system needed to serve two entirely different user groups with completely different needs, and trying to serve them both from the same interface was part of what had made the spreadsheet unworkable. Second, the most persistent concerns weren’t complicated to fix. They were happening because nothing was enforcing the rules that existed.
Contractors required a simple setup: log in, see jobs they were qualified for, claim one, complete it, and submit it. They didn’t need to see the full contractor network, jobs they weren’t qualified for, or internal operations. The system had to be clean, mobile-friendly, and easy to use without much instruction, and since I wouldn’t interact directly with the 100+ contractors. It needed to be intuitive so the operations team could explain it and contractors could use it easily.
The operations team sought full visibility and control over the entire system, both backend and frontend, for all assignments across every project and property. They wanted to see every job’s status, receive notifications of changes, and oversee contractor performance and compensation without manually checking each record. A dashboard was needed to show what was happening across the operation at any time.
To serve both user groups, the system’s architecture needed careful layering. It would be using the same data, but for two different interfaces with separate permission structures. The system was built across several interconnected Airtable tables, each covering a critical layer of the workflow.
Projects and Properties formed the foundation and were concerned with tracking evaluation projects from start to finish and storing all property-level information, including the alias details contractors used when working with property representatives.
Assignment Types defined all categories of work, such as E. phone calls, P. calls, onsite tours, web assessments, and their variations. Each had its certification requirements, methods, and instructions. This table enabled the certification filtering feature.
The Job Board was the contractor-facing layer, auto-populated with newly released assignments and filtered by certification, so each contractor saw only the work they were qualified to do.
Assignments formed the operational backbone. One table tracked every assignment from creation to feedback and compensation. All status changes (created, released, assigned, submitted, in review, analyzed, passed, passed with coaching, failed, or unsubmitted) were visible and up to date.
Analysis and Users completed the system’s architecture. These tables captured the internal review process and managed the full contractor and staff database, including unique IDs, certification levels, role types, and login details for the contractor portal.
Certification filtering was one of the most impactful features because it solved the main problem at its source instead of after the jobs had been claimed.
Each contractor held certifications in one or more of four categories, and each assignment required a specific certification. In the old Google Sheets world, nothing enforced this match, and the operations team paid for it every week. In the new interface built on Softr with Airtable as the backend, it happened automatically.
When contractors logged in to the job board, the platform used their certification profile to display only the assignments they were qualified for. Jobs they weren’t certified for didn’t appear, so there was nothing to click on accidentally.
The automated feedback and compensation workflow saved the operations team the most time.
In the old process, a contractor submitted an assignment, an analyst reviewed it, a project manager checked the analyst’s work, and then someone manually compiled feedback, created a compensation record, and sent it to the contractor. This happened for every assignment, all the time.
The new workflow automated everything after the project manager’s approval. Once the feedback form was approved, the system automatically generated a feedback record, sent it directly to the contractor’s email, and included their assignment outcome, any coaching points, and their compensation status. This was delivered with little manual action from the operations team. Consistently, within 48 hours of submission.
Consistent assignment status tracking ran alongside this. Every job’s progress was updated automatically in Airtable. The operations team could see the status of every assignment across all projects via a dashboard that showed updates, so they didn’t have to go through a spreadsheet.
These two features changed how the operations team functioned. The time spent on administrative tasks, such as chasing contractors, compiling manually, and checking status, was greatly reduced. That time could now be used for other work.
One important part of the build process was that the documentation had to handle many functional tasks.
Because I never interacted directly with the contractors, everything went through the operations team. The onboarding materials I created had to be clear enough for others to explain the new platform to over 100 contractors with different levels of technical comfort. I focused on making the contractor interface as self-explanatory as possible. The documentation helped the operations team bring new contractors onto the platform quickly and consistently as the network grew. The team had a contractor management infrastructure that finally matched the scale of what they were running.
Contractors logged into a portal that showed them the jobs they were qualified for and guided them through each step. All assignments followed a clear workflow with no manual status updates required. Feedback and compensation were delivered within 48 hours. The leasing scores clients relied on were based on data from qualified contractors who got timely, consistent feedback. Most importantly, the operations team could see every project, property, assignment, and contractor in one place.
What made this project successful was the same thing that makes any implementation project work, which is a team with a clear understanding of what was missing, close involvement throughout the process, and most importantly, a willingness to map out their processes rather than an idealized version.
