Internal staff portal — multi-association operations, maintenance, and finance in role-based dashboards

The challenge

Once the management SaaS was live, the operator's internal team — property managers, accountants, maintenance staff — was still routing daily work through email and shared spreadsheets. Each managed association had its own paper trail. Without a role-based operational portal, scaling to additional associations meant linearly scaling headcount. They needed a staff-facing layer that consolidated multi-association workflows, ticket tracking, and financial reporting under one identity model.

How we approached it

• →Mapped each role's day-in-the-life (manager, accountant, maintenance lead) and built role-scoped dashboards rather than one generic admin view
• →Reused the OA data model from the management platform — zero data duplication, single source of truth across the ecosystem
• →Designed multi-association workspaces so a single staff member can switch context without leaving the portal
• →Maintenance ticket lifecycle: creation, assignment, SLA tracking, resolution evidence, audit trail
• →Financial reporting with invoice generation and document storage tied directly to the association workspace

Outcomes

Stack highlights

• Next.js + TypeScript with the shared OA data model
• tRPC for end-to-end typed RPC between staff portal and core
• NextAuth for staff identity, role-based access control
• PostgreSQL via Drizzle ORM (shared schema with management app)
• Tailwind CSS, Vercel deployment
• AI-pair-programming across the staff dashboard build