Construction Project Management
Material issued, labour billed and work measured against the BOQ — so the cost of a job is known while it is running, not after handover.
Construction loses money quietly. Cement issued to the site and not fully accounted for, a thekedar paid on a rate nobody wrote down, a variation agreed on site and never added to the bill, and a BOQ that stopped matching reality in the second month. None of it looks like a problem at the time; all of it appears together in the final cost.
What gets built here follows the three things that actually move on a construction project: material from store to site, work measured against the BOQ, and money to contractors and subcontractors. Scoped to how your firm measures and bills, because an item-rate government contract and a private residential build are not the same job.
What it fixes
- Material issued to site from the store on a verbal request, so consumption against work done is never reconciled
- A BOQ in Excel at tender stage that no longer resembles what is being executed, with variations agreed on site and claimed late or not at all
- Labour and thekedar rates agreed verbally per item, then disputed at payment time
- Subcontractor running bills certified from site notes, with retention and advance recovery worked out by hand each time
- Progress reported as a percentage that nobody can tie back to measured quantities
- No live cost position per project, so a job that has gone over is identified at closing rather than during
What gets built
A starting point, not a fixed list. The build is scoped to your own process before anything is written.
BOQ and work measurement
Items with quantity and rate, executed quantity recorded against each, and variations added as they are approved — so measured work, not an estimate, drives the billing.
Material and store control
Purchase, receipt, issue to a site against a requisition, returns, and stock in hand per store. Consumption sits against the project, which is what makes the cost real.
Labour and thekedar accounts
Rates per item or per unit recorded in advance, work booked against them, advances given and recovered, and a running account per contractor.
Subcontractor running bills
Bills certified from measured quantities, with retention held, advance adjusted and the payment history kept against the subcontractor.
Project cost position
Material, labour, subcontract, machinery and overheads booked to the project, giving a live figure against the budget instead of a post-mortem.
Progress against schedule
Planned versus executed quantity by item and by period, with the activities that are behind visible early enough to act on.
Who this is for
Contractors and builders running several sites at once, where a storekeeper and a site engineer are already keeping records and the office is reconciling them late. It suits firms doing item-rate work where measurement is the basis of payment, and firms large enough that the owner cannot personally see every site. A single-site builder constructing one house, where the owner buys the material himself and pays the mason weekly, genuinely does not need this. Be clear-eyed about size too: measurement, material control and contractor billing together is a large build, and it is usually better to start with whichever one is currently costing you the most money.
Questions
Can site staff enter this, or does it all come back to the office?
It has to be entered at site to be worth anything — material issued today, quantity executed today. That means a simple mobile or tablet entry for the storekeeper and site engineer, and it means accepting that a system requiring a desktop at head office will be filled in from memory on Saturday. Where sites have poor connectivity, entry should work offline and sync later, so tell us if that applies.
Does it do planning and Gantt charts like Primavera or MS Project?
No, and we would not pretend otherwise. Detailed scheduling is a specialist tool and if your planner already works in Primavera, keep them there. What this does is tie executed quantities, material and cost to the project. Pulling the planned schedule in as a comparison is possible, but as an import rather than a replacement for a planning package.
We work on government contracts with their own measurement formats.
Then the measurement book and bill formats have to match what the department accepts, and that is worth putting on the table at scoping because it is specific work. Composite schedule rates and departmental bill formats can be built, but they are not generic and they need samples of the actual forms you submit before anyone can quote.
Tell us how your site runs.
We scope it first — what it takes, how long, what it costs. No obligation.