Case study · Property development
A New Zealand property developer runs several active builds with no administrative staff. Agreements now generate, send, chase and file themselves, and the accounts inbox sorts itself. One recurring task went from an hour to two minutes.
Background
The developer runs multiple active builds with no administrative staff. Every subcontractor line needed an agreement prepared from the job details, sent, chased, countersigned and filed. Every supplier invoice, statement, payment claim and reminder arriving in the accounts inbox had to be read, matched to a project and routed by a person.
The owner's brief was blunt: replace repetitive admin with AI rather than hire for it. Both automations run in the developer's own AWS account, under their own rules and templates, with the office team keeping the approve step.
Our approach
Walked the subcontractor process and the accounts inbox with the owner and the finance lead, line by line, and sized the build against logged hours rather than guesses.
The developer's own agreement templates, filing rules and numbering were kept exactly. The system fits the business, not the other way round.
The invoice reader ran in shadow mode against live mail before it was allowed to file anything, and the agreement pipeline had a full dry run with test recipients before the first real line.
Every working day an audit replays the flagged messages, checks nothing was misfiled, and ships fixes the same day. Rules that change are re-run against the backlog.
Challenges and solutions
Each agreement took about an hour: find the line details, fill the template, send, chase the signature, countersign, file, tell the office.
Supplier invoices, statements, payment claims, reminders and receipts all landed in one mailbox and needed a person to read and route each one.
Measurable results
Implementation timeline
What changed day to day
Fixed price, their templates, their AWS account. If your office is drowning in agreements and invoices, this is the shape of the fix.
The goal was to replace repetitive admin rather than add a person. Two months in, the developer still runs with no administrative staff.
Agreements and invoices no longer wait for one person at a desk. The run sheet and the queue show the state of every item to whoever picks it up.
Every agreement is chased and filed, every invoice is matched, and the ones needing a human decision are flagged rather than forgotten.
Signed agreements, invoices and statements land in the right folder with the right name every time, which makes month end and any later dispute simpler.
Agreements arrive the day a line is ready and replies are consistent, part of why the third project came within six weeks.
“We're a small company with no administrative staff, and our goal has been to replace repetitive admin tasks with AI. Skene has been the right partner for that. We've completed two projects with him so far, one of which cut a task from an hour down to two minutes, and we've just engaged him for a third.”
Callum, owner, Google review, October 2026
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