The filing cabinet problem

Most UK business centres are not short of information. They are short of one place to keep it. The key register is a drawer and a spreadsheet. The cleaning rota is on the office wall. Certificates are in a folder somebody set up in 2019. Maintenance requests arrive by email, text and in person at the desk. Renewal dates live in one person's calendar, and that person is on holiday.

None of that is negligence. It is what happens when a building is run well by people using the tools available, and it works right up until the moment somebody asks a question that spans two of those systems.

Front of house

Reception is where most of the day's information arrives, and where most of it gets lost. WorkHub gives the desk one screen:

  • Raise a maintenance ticket against the right company, office and floor while the person is still standing there
  • Book a meeting room at the tenant or external rate and see live availability
  • Issue or take back a key and have it recorded against a named holder
  • Look up which company is in which suite, and who their contacts are

Tenants can also do most of this themselves through their own portal, which is the fastest way to reduce the queue at the desk.

Multiple companies, one building

Every tenant company has a record: its offices, its people, its tenancy, its tickets, its bookings, its invoices and the history of every interaction. It is a CRM, but organised around occupancy rather than sales pipeline.

The practical value shows up in the small questions. Which company has the most maintenance callouts? Who is still holding three keys? Which tenancies end in the next quarter, and what are they paying now?

Licences, tenancies and renewals

Business centres tend to let on licences and short tenancies that turn over quickly. WorkHub builds each agreement from your own templates, merging in the company, company number, office, floor, rent and dates, and takes it through signing in a browser.

One thing worth knowing before you start: your own landlord signature has to be witnessed before WorkHub will issue tenant signing links at all. Any adult who watched you sign will do — it does not need a solicitor. It is blocked deliberately, because an executed agreement with an unwitnessed landlord signature is a problem you discover at the worst possible moment.

Renewals are filtered by how far out the end date is, and reminders fire ahead of the notice deadline.

Contractors, and what the work costs

Tickets carry a category, a priority, a location down to the floor and room, and their own response and resolution targets set per category. Assign work to your own staff, to a cleaner, or to an external contractor who gets the detail and the location.

Costs recorded against the ticket produce cost per ticket, cost per category and spend by contractor. A boiler that costs £200 four times a year is invisible as four small invoices and obvious as one total — which is the conversation to have at contract renewal.

Cleaning, and proving it happened

Housekeeping is scheduled per floor and per shift — morning, afternoon, evening or night — so a morning cleaner and an evening contractor each see their own round rather than the whole day's list.

A round can require a completion photo before it is closed, with a retention period you set. That is the difference between a tick and evidence.

Compliance

Gas safety, EICR, PAT records, fire risk assessment, alarm and emergency lighting tests, legionella, lift inspection, insurance. Each certificate holds its issue and expiry dates and the documents themselves, and warnings start far enough ahead that you can actually get an inspector booked.

Raise renewal task turns an approaching expiry into assigned work with a due date, which then picks up the escalating reminder chain until somebody completes it. A warning tells you something is expiring; a task makes it a person's job.

Keys

Every key, fob and card in a register, issued against a named holder, with an audit trail that cannot be edited. At move-out the tenancy record shows what is still outstanding, which is the moment you have leverage to get it back.

Invoicing and Xero

Raise invoices individually or in bulk, against tenancies or bookings. Each is categorised as rent, service charge, room hire or sundry, and posts to its own account in Xero rather than collapsing into one sales line.

WorkHub does not replace your accountant. It connects the building to the ledger so nobody types the same figure twice.

Pricing

All eight core modules are on every tier. Starter is £249 a month for a single site up to 30 offices; Professional is £449 for single or multi-site up to 80 offices and adds white-label branding; Enterprise is priced on enquiry beyond 80 offices.

No per-member charges, no add-on modules, no commission on your room-hire income.

Current status

WorkHub is pre-launch and taking early-access enquiries. Visitor management and telephony are placeholders in the product, not working features — both are on the public roadmap.