Meridia Living

Meridia Living develops high-density multifamily projects. Each deal moves through roughly sixty repeatable tasks between opportunity and construction start, and those tasks lived in emails and in team members' heads. Leadership could not see stage status or upcoming work at a glance, ownership of tasks overlapped, and when construction kicked off, data was re-keyed by hand into Procore. The pipeline was growing faster than the Excel tracker holding it together, and the team was clear that any replacement had to feel spreadsheet-simple or it would not be adopted.

The engagement ran in two steps in 2025. A consultation came first. We mapped the current workflow, agreed the feature list for a minimum viable product, and delivered a system architecture diagram with time and cost estimates before any build began. Then the Smartsheet implementation, scoped deliberately as an MVP with no integrations or premium add-ons.

The workspace holds a pipeline sheet, with one row per project carrying stage, market, lead, and a red, yellow, green health flag computed from task and permit status. A checklist sheet is fed by a master template, so moving a project to a new stage spawns that stage's task set automatically. Alongside them sit a permit tracker, a budget sheet with a 60 and 90 day cash needs look-ahead, and a contract and entity sheet. Automations send assignment notices, reminders 48 hours before due dates, daily alerts on overdue work, and a Monday morning digest to every task owner. Permits sitting at submitted get a follow-up nudge every fourteen days until they resolve. Dashboards exist at three levels, for the portfolio, a single project, and each lead. We migrated the cleaned Excel data, locked the structure sheets to admins, and handed over an admin guide, a quick start for end users, two recorded training sessions, and a hypercare period. The whole thing was designed so the firm's internal quarterback maintains it without a developer.

The Excel tracker was replaced. A stage change now produces the checklist instead of someone remembering it, permits waiting on an agency are chased automatically, and funding needs inside the next 90 days appear on a dashboard rather than in someone's head. The build was delivered in 2025.

Given the same problem now we would build the development pipeline as Meridia's own system, with the same stages, checklists, permits, and cash look-ahead, plus the Procore integration that was out of scope for the MVP, so construction kickoff stops requiring re-entry at all. The Smartsheet MVP earned adoption by staying simple. An owned build keeps that simplicity and removes both the licensing and the integration ceiling.