Sub-Cases and Roll-Ups: Managing a Building as One Record With Many Units
A building is not a folder of flats. It is a thing with its own budget, its own owner and its own questions — answered from the units beneath it.
Ask a managing agent about a building and the questions are about the whole: what is the arrears across the block, what did we spend on maintenance this year, when is the next major works. Ask about a flat and the questions are about the part: is this tenant paid up, when does their lease end. The same data answers both — if it is structured to.
Parent and sub-cases
A building case holds what belongs to the building: the owner (or the owners' association), the insurance, the service contracts, the communal maintenance, the budget. Beneath it, one sub-case per unit from a unit template; beneath each unit, a tenancy per letting, and under that the maintenance requests. The cases list groups sub-cases under their parent, or flattens them when you want every tenancy in a column.
Creating a sub-case from the parent pre-fills what it inherits — the address, the owner, the managing agent — so a new tenancy on Flat 4 starts with the building already known.
Roll-ups
A roll-up is a field on the parent computed from the children: count of units let, sum of rent due this month across all tenancies, sum of maintenance spend across all requests, the earliest lease expiry. They recalculate when a child changes. The building case's summary tab is a set of roll-ups; open no unit and you still know the state of the block.
Money across the block
With the accounting integration connected, the building-wide ledger shows charges and payments across every tenancy, and the owner's payout is a formula on the building: rent received minus agreed fees minus maintenance, per period. The statement of account for the owner is generated from the building case; the statement for a tenant from their tenancy. Same numbers, two documents.
Contact pools
The people attached to the sub-cases form a pool the parent can address: a poll to every owner in the block, an update to every tenant, a file request to every leaseholder for their insurance certificate. One action from the building, delivered to the people on the units.
Where to start
Copy the building family from the template library — building, unit, tenancy, maintenance request — and rename the fields you call something else. Import the units from your rent roll CSV as sub-cases of one building. Then attach the tenancies as they come up for renewal, one at a time, and the block is fully modelled within a year without a migration project.
