How Cleverly connected project delivery, change approvals and staged billing
Reactive work-order tools did not give property and facilities teams a connected way to manage long-running projects, changing scope, approvals, supplier work and staged billing.
Devntech’s scope: Devntech built the project-delivery workflow inside Cleverly’s property-operations platform, covering planning, change control and staged billing. This case does not attribute adoption or commercial performance to the work without a measured baseline.
Hero visual
One project record from planning through commercial close
A portfolio or Gantt view with project names and commercial data redacted.
The engagement
What Devntech built for Cleverly
Cleverly helps property and facilities teams manage maintenance, compliance, suppliers and reporting. Devntech expanded the platform with a Projects module that joins planning, scope changes, approvals and billing instead of treating them as disconnected administrative tasks.
What we changed
- 1
Built a dedicated project-delivery module inside an existing operations platform.
- 2
Connected project changes to approval workflows.
- 3
Added staged-billing behaviour to the delivery process.
Qualitative evidence
What changed operationally
- Planned projects have their own phases, work packages and dependencies instead of being forced into a reactive-job record.
- A scope change carries its operational impact, commercial value and approval state in one traceable decision record.
- Staged billing is connected to project delivery state rather than maintained as a separate commercial process.
Evidence standard: These are delivered workflow and operating-state changes supported by the project record. They are qualitative results, not estimated percentages or modelled savings.
What Devntech continued to own
- Product engineering
- Workflow design
- Platform extension
This is what we mean by
Internal applicationsOperational flow
How the system works
The system is organized around three operational steps, with each handoff tied to a clear purpose and owner.
Workflow visual
Project plan, scope change, approval and staged billing
An annotated flow showing how a delivery change becomes part of the billable project record.
Step 1
Plan the project
Project work can be managed separately from a reactive work order while retaining operational context.
Step 2
Approve scope changes
Changes move through a documented approval path before they affect commercial work.
Step 3
Bill in stages
Delivery and commercial state remain connected through staged billing.
What changed in practice
Capabilities built around the real workflow
Specific system capabilities, described by the operational job they do.
Product state
A traceable scope-change decision
A redacted change-order screen showing reason, value, decision state and project connection.
- Projects module
- Adds structure for longer-running, multi-step work.
- Change control
- Makes scope changes visible and reviewable.
- Staged billing
- Connects delivery milestones to commercial administration.
Implementation detail
What made this system difficult - and how we handled it
The decisions below came from the operating constraints of this engagement, not from a generic technology template.
Why a work order could not represent a property project
A work order is suited to a short, mostly linear job: raise it, assign it, complete it and invoice it. Larger property projects may run for months, contain dependent phases and work packages, and change after surveys or site work begin. Customer billing, supplier costs and retention can move on different schedules while still belonging to the same commercial commitment.
Representing that work as several unrelated jobs made project status harder to understand and separated delivery information from commercial decisions. A separate project-management product would create another version of the truth that still had to be reconciled with costs and invoices. Cleverly needed a project model inside the platform its teams already used.
The project model connected planning to commercial history
Devntech designed and built a Projects module where a project can be divided into phases, work packages and tasks, then viewed through project and portfolio timelines. Scope changes are recorded against the relevant work, given a reason and value, and moved through a customer decision path. Approved value can then become part of the project’s billable record.
Customer invoices, supplier invoices, payment applications and retention remain attached to the same project structure. That creates a traceable relationship between what was planned, what changed, what was accepted and what became payable. The product is more than a planning screen because operational and financial state share one underlying model.
Introducing the module safely inside a live platform
The implementation included a custom canvas-based Gantt designed around Cleverly’s interaction model rather than a disconnected embedded tool. Devntech also used reversible steps when changing existing retention data and reconciled business rules that existed in both application code and database triggers. Those details mattered because the module extended a live product with established records.
The result is a foundation for later reporting, permissions, automated checks and AI-assisted operations. Reliable automation depends on structured states and auditable decisions; it cannot be added safely to a project history assembled from unrelated jobs and spreadsheets. The transferable lesson is to model delivery and commercial control together before layering automation on top.
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