Client type
Commercial Property Firm
Key stakeholders
Operations
Location
Global
Project outline
- Our client, a global commercial real estate brokerage, was carrying large volumes of deal expenses that had been spent first, tracked later and recovered by hand across disconnected systems.
- StructureIt ran a timeboxed discovery and design engagement that gave the client a validated picture of the process and a costed, decision-ready plan to bring those expenses under control.
The Challenge
Every deal at our client carries costs long before it closes. Brokers and their support teams pay for travel, marketing, aerial photography, legal fees and closing dinners, and each expense is meant to come back to the firm in one of two ways: (1) out of the broker’s commission, or (2) billed back to the client who asked for the work.
In practice, the money went out first and the tracking came later. Expenses moved through four separate systems for customer relationships, employee expenses, vendor procurement and revenue management, joined by manual reconciliation and no shared view. The revenue management platform at the center of it was disconnected, with manual corrections and overrides. There was an ongoing worry that the numbers were out of date, and at the aggregate level, a concern that expenses were growing stale and potentially unrecoverable.
The weight of that fell on people. Teams spent hours every week reconciling reports that ran from 500 to 5,000 lines, working overtime to keep up. Clients were being chased for reimbursements dating back a few years, and in some cases, balances were settled for less than they were worth.
Through years of working alongside clients in capital markets and commercial real estate, StructureIt’s teams had developed a working understanding of how deal economics and back-office processes connect. That understanding shaped the engagement from day one.
How StructureIt helped
Before proposing any solution, the team set out to learn how the process ran from the people who ran it, so that whatever came next would fit the business rather than the other way round. The engagement ran as a fixed-price, timeboxed discovery and design project.
Discovery began with recorded, structured interviews across seven functions. Each conversation focused on the supporting business processes from the moment an expense was incurred to the moment it was recovered or written off. From those conversations, the team built current-state process maps and documented distinct pain points with the evidence to support them.
The maps then went back to the people who knew the process best. In a series of review sessions, the client’s teams corrected and confirmed the processes, following a single thread through the full story of a deal, which was precisely the view the business had been missing.
With a shared picture agreed, the team moved to the future state, creating the target solution design for a new expense-tracking solution. The design worked around the legacy platforms rather than through it to ensure that the target state would align to existing technology strategies and guidelines.
To make the design tangible, the team turned AI-generated interface designs into a working prototype, giving the client’s leaders something to interact with and visualize before any build commitment.
The Results
Our client finished the engagement with a decision-ready plan it owns outright. Where there had been regional anecdotes and competing spreadsheets, there was now a single evidence base, a validated picture of the process, and a costed route forward.
- A quantifiable expense exposure
- A working prototype outlining key business processes across all teams from which stakeholders could visualize the future state
- Documented target architecture state for the internal technical teams to progress forward
- Costed implementation options presented, alongside the cost of doing nothing
The evidence base replaced guesswork about where operations were drowning in manual overhead and where expense exposure was concentrated. The target state gave the business a way to restore visibility first, without waiting for every control to be built. The cost of inaction gave leadership a clear basis for weighing the investment, and the prototype let them see the outcome before paying for it.
The deliverables were built to stand on their own. Editable process maps, an integration blueprint and an implementation plan that were all handed over to the client’s internal team, ready to be acted on by their own technology function or by any implementation partner they choose. No ongoing support was required to make use of them, and our client decides when to proceed and with whom.
What this engagement shows is the value of understanding a problem properly before writing a line of code. A short, paid design phase gave our client the clarity to make a significant technology decision on evidence rather than instinct, with a plan that still holds whichever path they take.
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