Case study
Guardian Rental Management. Six systems, one staff hub.
Residential and commercial property management, Thunder Bay. My own company, and the first business to go through the Keel Method and onto Keel Bridge.
“I own Guardian, so this is not a client testimonial. It is the reason Keel exists. Before we built the hub, running Guardian meant living in six systems at once, and the gaps between them were exactly where things got lost. What follows is what we built, what changed, and what it taught me about doing this for other owners.”
Ryan Campbell, owner, Guardian Rental Management
Where we started.
The work was spread across six systems that did not speak to each other: PayProp for trust accounting, PropertyMeld for maintenance, QuickBooks for the books, Float for staff card spend, Google Drive for documents, and spreadsheets for the rest. Everyone re-keyed the same information into two or three places. A receipt nobody could find, a card charge nobody had coded, a job nobody owned: that was a normal week.
Writing it down first.
Before a line of the hub was built, we mapped how Guardian actually ran. For each core process, from a tenant enquiry through to an owner statement, we wrote down who did what, in what order, in which of the six systems, and where the information had to be typed in a second time. The map showed the gaps were not in any one system but between them, and it showed which steps were worth keeping exactly as they were. Out of that came the three things the hub was then built to serve: a 30-section staff manual, a wiki of standard operating procedures, and checklists for the jobs that kept getting half-done. That work would have been useful with no software at all. It is also why the build took eight weeks instead of a year: we were not designing a product, we were putting a process we had already agreed on into one screen.
- What we mapped
- Tenant enquiry to lease, rent and arrears, maintenance request to invoice, staff card spend to reconciliation, owner statements, move-in and move-out.
- What we kept as-is
- PayProp for trust accounting, PropertyMeld for work orders.
- What the hub took over
- Everything that lived in spreadsheets or in someone's head.
What we built.
With the map and the procedures in hand, we built a single staff hub, which we call Ledger Buddy, that sits over all of it and connects nine outside systems, so information is entered once and flows where it needs to go. Every screen in it corresponds to a step on the map.
- PayProp
- PropertyMeld
- QuickBooks
- QuickBooks Time
- Float
- Google Workspace and Drive
- SingleKey
- TenantTurner
- Notion
What changed.
Financial control
Every dollar of staff card spend now has to land somewhere: coded to a QuickBooks expense, pushed to a property in PayProp, or explicitly excluded with a reason on the record. Receipts are matched to charges automatically and attached to the accounting entry itself, so the evidence travels with the transaction instead of sitting in someone's inbox. We have put more than 1,300 card charges through it. What used to be a month-end reconciliation scramble is now a live count of open items that we keep at zero. It saves us hours every day, not minutes.
No re-keying
Bills and expenses post straight into QuickBooks and PayProp with the paperwork attached. No double entry, no duplicates, and safeguards that catch a tax figure before it posts wrong rather than after.
Nothing invisible
Work sits on shared boards, maintenance is tracked against real numbers, and I can see what everyone has on their plate without asking. Every meaningful action is logged with who did it and when, which matters for managing people and for handing clean records to our accountant.
Know-how out of people's heads
A 30-section staff manual, an SOP wiki and checklists live in the system, so onboarding someone no longer means shadowing someone for a month.
What it taught me.
The whole thing went from nothing to running the business in about eight weeks, and it has not stopped; it changes most weeks as we find the next thing slowing us down. That responsiveness was the real value. We were not buying software and bending the business to fit it. We were getting the business we actually run, built into a tool. The order was the lesson: map first, build second. Nadine is now running the full Keel Method pass at Guardian, sitting with the staff rather than relying on my own account of how things work, and refining the maps and the manual as she goes. That is the version every Keel client gets from day one.
6 core processes mapped before building
8 weeks from nothing to running the business
9 outside systems connected
1,300+ card charges reconciled
660 changes shipped during the build
Figures as of 4 September 2026.