How Mini-Box took a 50-year-old paper facility fully automatic, in weeks.
Entrepôts Mini-Box Ste-Catherine is a 300-unit facility on Montreal's South Shore, part of the growing Mini-Box group. The site is a fixture: it has operated since 1973, and for almost all of that time, it ran on paper.
- Units
- 300+
- Operating since
- 1973
- Before Stortech
- No software
The challenge
A half-century of paper
When the Mini-Box group acquired the site, they inherited a working business and a back office frozen in time. Tenant files lived in folders. Billing was entirely manual.
Every first of the month, someone drove to the office before dawn to run every payment through the terminal by hand, hundreds of them, one at a time. Miss a morning and the rent didn't come in.
It worked, the way manual things work: right up until you want to grow.
The bet
Betting on the avant-garde
When the group took over the site, they needed software to run it: billing, leases, the whole operation. The safe pick was obvious: the storage industry's established platform, the decade-old name nobody second-guesses.
Luc, Wassim, and Audrey went the other way. They chose Stortech, not for what the app could do that month, but for where it was clearly headed.
A calculated bet, not a gamble. And today, they're the ones collecting on it.
“We could have gone with the big name in the industry and nobody would have questioned it. But the others were selling us what they had already built, while Stortech was showing us where the industry was headed. We didn't buy a feature list. We bought a direction, and a team that ships every month.”
The solution
Every tenant, every payment, in weeks
We didn't hand over a login and wish them luck. Pulling a book out of a known platform is a data migration: you export, you import, you're done. A half-century of paper doesn't export. Someone has to decide, file by file, what is still true.
That's where Audrey was irreplaceable. What the folders didn't say, she knew: who was actually in which unit, which arrangement still stood, which name had changed along the way. We knew our system; she knew her tenants. It took both.
The hard part, turning years of manual billing into automatic, secure payments, we untangled together. A first for them and a first for us. Every paper migration is: there's no template to import, just a site, its history, and someone who knows it by heart.
In weeks, the entire book was on Stortech and ready for the first automatic billing cycle.
“Fifty years of paper, more than 300 tenants: it was quite the job. The team was with me from start to finish, migrating all of it and cleaning it up as we went. Nobody ever sent me off to a 1-800 number with an open ticket.”
The results
The first of the month, handled
The first automatic cycle landed on January 1st, the one morning of the year nobody wants to be up at 5 a.m. Under the old system, someone would have been at the office before dawn on New Year's Day, running payments by hand while everyone else slept off New Year's Eve.
This time, no alarm: rent collected itself, and the Mini-Box team spent New Year's Day with their families instead of at the terminal.
Automatic billing was only the part they felt first. The whole operation now runs on Stortech, from online rental and e-signature leases to a self-serve tenant portal, automatic late fees and reminders, and a real-time view of occupancy and revenue where a wall of folders used to be.
One modern system replaced the paper, the terminal, and the pre-dawn drive.
“I'm a big believer in self storage, and the potential is huge. A badly run facility is value left on the table, but mostly it's tenants left waiting. When the team isn't buried in data entry, they're there for the people renting from us. That's exactly why we chose Stortech.”
Migrating off paper or dinosaur software?
We'll do the heavy lifting with you: every tenant, every payment, all the way to the first automatic billing cycle.
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