Wallerand Delevacq
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Leg 02 / Bellman / 2022-2026

Lobby: opening a lettings business

In 2022 the vendor behind Lobby, a condominium management product, opened a second business line. I led the project from business requirements to migrating the first users.

Flight plan

Period
October 2022 to 2026
Role
Initiator and team lead, product and engineering
Team
3 in the first year, then 2
Stack
Node, GraphQL, Prisma, PostgreSQL, Qovery
3
data migrations from competing ERPs to move new users over
< 1 month
per migration, against 6 months at competitors
10
clients in production before Bellman was acquired

The accounting flow

From the rent payment to the statement sent to the landlord, with no re-keying.

  1. WP01BankEBICS, CFONB statements, cheque OCR
  2. WP02ReconciliationAutomatic, with matching
  3. WP03Agency accountingRent calls, fees, reversals
  4. WP04Landlord statementComputed, closed, sent to the landlord

Context

Bellman builds Lobby, a condominium management product. In 2022 the company moved into lettings management, which requires full agency accounting, automated bank flows and importing each new user’s data.

What I did

I started the project and led it to production, on the product side as well as the engineering side: requirements, accounting and legal rules, data model, development, infrastructure and data migrations.

  • Leases, guarantors, rent indexation and reviews, rent and service charge calls, charge reconciliation.
  • Automatic rent receipts, arrears reminders, SEPA direct debits with generated mandates.
  • Landlord statements: periods, computation, closing, cancellation.
  • Invoices and fees, bookkeeping, reversals with automatic matching.
  • EBICS bank connection, CFONB import, automatic reconciliation, cheque OCR.
  • An MCP server for lettings, so the business can be driven from an AI agent.

Leadership

  • Team lead: splitting the work, technical decisions, code reviews.
  • Hiring developers: interviews and technical exercises, which I gathered in a shared repository.
  • Onboarding and mentoring newcomers, on agency accounting as much as on the codebase.
  • Running the team’s rituals.

Around the product

  • Moved hosting from Heroku to Qovery, with production, development, demo and feature environments in Terraform and secrets in Doppler.
  • A Flutter mobile app for landlords, where I am the main author.
  • Open source fixes, in Qovery’s Terraform provider and in the Prisma read replicas extension.

What it shows

Opening a new business line inside a company: understanding agency accounting well enough to encode it, then shipping it with its infrastructure and data migrations.

One decision

Importing migration data

Context
Every new user arrives with years of data in their previous software.
Decision
One import format, published as a JSON Schema, that each source product is converted into.
Consequence
3 migrations completed, each in under a month, where competitors take 6.