A Custom Inspection Management Portal for a Building and Pest Firm

The problem

The client is one of Canberra's established building and pest inspection
firms. A booking arrives, an inspector attends, a report is written and
proofed, the invoice goes out. Simple to describe. Hard to run at volume,
because one job touches five teams and a dozen people outside the business.

The customers are rarely the people who pay. An agent books for a vendor, a
conveyancer wants the report for a purchaser, and the owner has to be reached
for access. Every job is a small coordination problem, and most of the parties
have no idea what stage anything is at.

They were running it on a booking system that knew about appointments and
almost nothing else. Access arrangements arrived by email and stayed in
someone's inbox. Whether the owner had signed the deferred payment agreement
was a question you answered by searching your sent items. The office knew who
was rostered on, but not whether the property had been inspected before, nor
how far the inspector had to drive between the 11 AM and the 2 PM.

So work was invisible, handovers leaked, and the knowledge lived in people.
When the person who knew a particular agency's arrangement was away, the job
stalled.

A job that carries its own process

A job here is not a status. It is six parallel lanes, one per team: Booking,
Prepping, Inspecting, Proofing, Enquiries and Accounts, each with its own
checklist, assignee and progress.

That came out of how the firm actually works. Prepping can be finishing title
checks while Booking is still chasing a signature. A single linear status
could never say that, so the office kept the truth in their heads.

Steps tick off two ways. A person ticks some. The system ticks others when the
thing genuinely happened: the confirmation went, the inspection hit the
calendar, the signed agreement came back. Those are marked "Auto" with a
timestamp, so nobody has to trust a checkbox someone ticked out of optimism.

Beside the checklist sits every action available on this job: send the owner
confirmation, reschedule, cancel, lock in confirmations. The ones that are not
ready are greyed out with the reason showing. The staff member does not have
to know the rules, because the page tells them.

The job page also surfaces what people used to learn the hard way. Inspected
before? A banner says so and links to the history. Different inspector on the
day? Called out in the header.

Scheduling built for a driving day

Inspectors do not work a calendar, they work a route. So the day is one row
per inspector, each job carrying its difficulty rating, whether keys are
involved, whether the agent will be on site, whether it needs two people.

Between consecutive jobs sits the driving distance and time, peak-hour aware,
with a running total. A booker dragging a job into an afternoon slot sees
immediately that it adds 28 kilometres to somebody's day. Leave is drawn onto
the same view, so an inspector who is away is struck through rather than
quietly missing.

The mailbox, attached to the work

The shared mailbox is where the coordination actually happens, so the portal
brought it inside. Mail syncs into a triage queue, and filing a message
against a job attaches it to that job's history. The next person to open the
job finds the access instructions without going looking.

Contacts follow the same logic. Agencies, agents, owners and conveyancers are
separate registers with real relationships, not one flat list. An agency has
teams. A property has an ownership history. A job links the owner, the agent
and the conveyancer, so the right confirmation reaches the right person
without anyone deciding who that is each time.

Configuration the office owns

The parts of the business that change are configuration, not code. Packages,
prices, message templates, job types, the step definitions for each lane,
the public holidays: staff edit all of it. When a price changes or an email
needs rewording, nobody waits for a developer.

Assistants that cite their sources

Inspectors carry a set of in-house assistants covering compliance, report
comments, termite risk and energy ratings. Each answers from the firm's own
document library and cites what it drew on, with an authority hierarchy behind
it so a current standard outranks an older internal note.

The value is not the novelty. It is that a junior inspector in a roof cavity
gets the answer the senior inspector would have given, with the source
attached, instead of a phone call that may not be answered.

Two decisions worth stealing

The step engine is data, not code. Steps, exclusions, team assignments and
trigger conditions are all records, which is the only reason the office can
edit its own process without us.

The knowledge base runs on pgvector inside the same PostgreSQL database rather
than a separate vector service. For a business this size, one less moving part
to operate is worth more than the performance headroom.