AI-powered invoice scanning, document management and supplier portal for a 33,600-home housing association
Stonewater needed to bring order to a fragmented document estate and modernise how their suppliers interact with the business. Blacklight delivered a SharePoint-based document management platform and a purpose-built supplier portal, with AI-driven invoice processing built in from the start.
- homes managed across England
- 33,600
- customers served
- 75,000+
- of documents brought into one structured environment
- 10,000s
With this platform, Blacklight Software have delivered truly cutting-edge technology that will allow our business to lead the way in the housing sector for many years to come. Being one of the first in the sector to make this bold transition to full Microsoft 365 integration has delivered significant capabilities that will bring cost savings and efficiency benefits for many years to come.
The problem
Stonewater manages around 33,600 homes across England and serves more than 75,000 customers. Its documents lived in multiple repositories, organised inconsistently, with search and retrieval slow enough to drag on customer service.
The sharper risk was regulatory. With records scattered, there was no reliable way to guarantee finding everything held on a given individual, a direct problem for GDPR and Subject Access Requests. And around the document estate, manual filing and manual invoice handling were absorbing time the housing teams didn't have.
What we built
Three connected pieces of one platform, built on SharePoint, Microsoft 365 and Azure and stitched together through the Microsoft Graph interface.
- Document management, a structured SharePoint environment that applies metadata automatically and generates the right folder structure the moment a new tenant is set up. Filing stopped being a manual job, and because every record now lands in a known place with known metadata, finding everything held on one person became possible again.
- Purchase-to-pay, approval workflows with intelligent document routing, using Azure AI (Cognitive Services) to read each incoming invoice, validate its amounts and work-order codes against the financial system, then either flag exceptions for a human or process payment automatically, based on invoice value and business rules.
- Supplier portal, a standalone, responsive .NET portal with its own identity and password management, so suppliers upload invoices, manage their details, delegate access to colleagues and track their transactions from any device, without needing Microsoft 365 accounts of their own.
The three parts validate against Stonewater's financial system rather than operating beside it, invoices are checked, not just captured, and the whole platform stays inside Stonewater's own Microsoft 365 estate, under its own control.
The result
Tens of thousands of documents now sit in a single structured SharePoint environment, filed automatically from the moment a tenancy is created. Invoices are read and validated by AI before anyone approves them; suppliers serve themselves through the portal instead of emailing paperwork in. And the compliance risk that started the project is closed: Stonewater can answer a Subject Access Request across the whole document estate.
What this delivered
- 01 Tens of thousands of documents brought into a single structured SharePoint environment
- 02 Automatic folder creation on new tenant setup, eliminating manual filing
- 03 AI invoice processing with validation against financial systems before approval
- 04 Suppliers self-managing submissions through a branded portal without needing M365 access
- 05 Full Subject Access Request compliance achieved across the document estate
Talk to us
Do you want similar results?
Tell us about your challenge. We will show you what is possible.