Jennings & Barrett

With over four decades of experience, Jennings & Barrett is an award-winning block and estate management company, serving the London and South-East property market. As their portfolio grew, they recognized the need for a modern, specialized software solution to support their expansion while maintaining high standards of service and efficiency.

After a thorough review of available options, Blocks Online was chosen for its robust accounting capabilities, automation of routine tasks, and accessible cloud-based system. Key features, such as automated payment runs and direct uploads of receipts from banking records, transformed their financial processes, saving significant time for the accounts team. Additionally, the software’s leaseholder portal provided clients with easy access to account information and an efficient way to report issues, enhancing communication and satisfaction.

The system also reduced operational costs, improved workflow efficiency, and became a valuable selling point for Jennings & Barrett when pitching to new clients. Since implementing Blocks Online, the company has grown its portfolio by 1,500 units, reaching 4,500 units under management. Blocks Online has been integral to their ability to scale while maintaining exceptional service standards.

Jennings and Barrett decided that they needed specialist software that would:

• Allow them to expand their management portfolio
• Provide access for leaseholders to view their own service charge account and raise building faults or other enquiries
• Was accessible for all staff with a pleasant user interface and great customer service.

Justina adds:
“I and my accounts team had some specific areas we wanted to address including being able to save time and effort in the posting of leaseholder receipts, accessing supplier invoices and dealing with payment runs which can be quite time consuming in having to check the funds in the bank before the payment can be confidently processed as well as manually ticking every invoice we wanted to pay.”

After much consideration of various options on the market, Blocks Online was selected. The accounting is robust, compliant and provides for automation of standard processes. The cloud access simplified access for staff and reduced the cost for duplicate Microsoft licencing, which was required by our previous software solution.

The Blocks Online system enables us to upload receipts directly from our banking records, every supplier invoice is uploaded and attached to the transaction and there is an automated payment run where the system recognises the funds in the bank account and produces the report of invoices available for payment.

The cost of the system was lower than our previous software, customer service was accessible and reactive. Jennings and Barrett use the software system as a feature when they draw up a proposal for a potential new management and it is one of the tools that our new clients say they value.

In the year since introducing the Blocks Online software to the business, we have grown our portfolio by circa 1500 units to 4,500 units under management.

Uploading receipts directly from our banking records has saved us a lot of time which we previously spent on recording every receipt individually and manually, the process now takes only a couple of minutes and truly increased our efficiency.

Supplier invoices are easily accessible and easy to amend if needed and the Blocks Online software provides us with a more efficient process of settling supplier invoices and producing remittance advices.