Case Study - LiveOak Inventories

Live Oak Inventories, based in Wandsworth, SW London, provides check-in and check-out inventory services to private landlords and letting agents at the beginning and end of residential tenancies.

The Challenge

Live Oak's business model is a 'virtual' business, in that it has a small core office staff and a number of inventory clerks working from home who make visits to rental properties, rarely visiting the company's office. In order to make this work efficiently, it was important to put in place a scheduling system which would do the following:

• Allow the office administrator to schedule appointments to clerks quickly and easily, with an overview of all clerks' activity on a given day
• Allow clerks easy access to their appointments, both by logging in to the system and being sent an automated daily email of their appointments
• Provide management reporting on clerks' work
• Make the system fully web-based, so that Live Oak do not need to run hardware or software on site

The Solution

Live Oak had investigated various web calendar applications, but found that most of those on offer were geared more towards managing one's own appointments via a web-based system than managing a team.

Nuvola developed a web-based calendar and appointment management system which provides an easy way for Live Oak to manage its business and keep an overview of its clerks' work. By building a system which was designed specifically to run the business' field operations, Nuvola was able to provide much more value to the business than some of the off-the-shelf web calendars could have done.

Building on this work, the system has now been extended to integrate customer payments with the appointment management. Clients who do not have an account need to pay online before they are able to download their inventory reports, improving cashflow as some of these private landlords were previously taking 3 months or more to pay.