How a Leeds property maintenance firm got its first ever weekly profit view
Stoneworks went from a 5-day monthly close with no margin visibility to a live weekly P&L — letting them spot a £14k margin leak in their first month and fix it before it became £170k a year.
Stoneworks Property handles reactive and planned maintenance for 40+ rental properties around Leeds, working with five landlord clients and a panel of 12 subcontractors covering everything from boilers to roofing. Founders Daniel Reilly and Asha Mehta had built a healthy turnover business — but flew completely blind on profitability.
The pain: profitability arrived three weeks late
Every month was the same dance. Subcontractors sent invoices on different dates, in different formats, against jobs that were sometimes weeks old. Stoneworks then re-invoiced the landlord, often without certainty about whether the job had actually been completed cleanly. The bookkeeper closed the month around the 25th — three weeks after the period being reviewed.
By the time Daniel and Asha had a number they trusted, the next month was nearly over. They could see whether the business made money, but never which jobs, which landlords, or which contractors were the problem.
The fix: one operating system for jobs, contractors, and money
Workatool let Stoneworks treat every reactive job and every planned visit as a single record, with the assigned contractor's cost attached at quote time and the landlord's price attached at the same moment. The moment a job was marked complete, the gross margin on that job was visible in the live reports dashboard.
The new monthly rhythm
- Contractors submit costs through the Workatool portal — no more email PDFs.
- Landlord invoices auto-generate with margin baked into the line items.
- A weekly P&L view shows revenue, contractor cost, and margin by landlord and by job type.
- Monthly close now takes one day instead of five — and the answer hasn't moved by the time the team reads it.
The result: a £14k leak caught in week three
In their first month on Workatool, the live margin view surfaced something neither founder had spotted: one contractor was consistently quoting 18% above panel average on emergency boiler call-outs, and Stoneworks was eating the margin difference rather than passing it through. The contract was renegotiated within the week. The annualised saving was £14k per month — over £170k a year that would otherwise have quietly evaporated.
Quote turnaround for new landlord enquiries also dropped from four days to one, and Stoneworks has since added two new landlord clients on the strength of being 'the maintenance firm that actually replies'.
We thought we needed a finance hire. We actually just needed visibility. Workatool gave us a P&L we can trust on a Tuesday.