Full-stack product delivery
LeaseTrack: a new portal around a legacy lease platform
The business needed to take a vulnerable legacy customer portal offline, but the same platform (LeaseCore) held the lease data and financial processes staff relied on every day. I owned the delivery of LeaseTrack, a replacement customer-facing application that kept those internal processes available.
- Customers
- 5,000+ migrated
- Delivery
- 8 months
- Release
- November 2024
- Scope
- Full-stack ownership
The problem
A security review had identified vulnerabilities in LeaseCore, including unsupported dependencies. The business could not retire LeaseCore immediately: it stored customer accounts, transactions and lease balances, and its public portal still let customers view budgets, submit claims and request support. Simply switching off external access would have removed services customers needed.
The existing portal also used four-digit usernames, could display balances that had not been recalculated since the last batch, and routed ordinary changes through support staff.
My role
I worked with the board to define the first release around two constraints: reduce exposure of the legacy application and preserve the customer journeys already in use. I was responsible for discovery, architecture, database and API work, the React interface, authentication, deployment and production support. A six-month target became an eight-month delivery as we included additional self-service and security work.
How I built it
Keep the existing business data where it belonged
Most of the information LeaseTrack needed already lived in the LeaseCore MSSQL database. Rather than introduce a third database and another synchronisation problem, I added portal-owned tables for identities, MFA, preferences and activity alongside the existing lease data. The Node.js API exposed controlled operations and reused legacy stored procedures where they remained necessary. This kept the legacy dependency explicit; it did not remove all of its testing limitations.
Design around actual customer and staff behaviour
I mapped the old database and application workflows, listened to customer calls and reviewed prototypes with directors, managers and frontline staff. Feedback shaped the budget breakdown, clearer transactions, downloadable documents and the self-service changes that had previously required manual support. I kept the first release focused on replacing the existing customer journey rather than rebuilding internal lease management.
Deliver and operate the replacement
I built the React client and the Express API in TypeScript, implemented email-based sign-in, MFA and authorisation, and prepared the customer migration. Docker, GitHub Actions, Azure Bicep, staging, Sentry and Grafana supported deployment and production troubleshooting. Employees with active leases tested the live journey before customer cutover.
The result
LeaseTrack went into production on 14 November 2024 and supported the migration of more than 5,000 customers. Customers gained current lease information, more understandable budgets, documents and self-service account changes. Staff reported far fewer calls about forgotten usernames and routine profile updates.
The key architectural outcome was the separation of public customer access from the older portal while keeping the internal lease-management (LeaseCore) platform in service.