The company made money this year. Which of the eleven sites made it, and which one absorbed most of it, is a different question — and in most contracting businesses it is answered long after the answer could have changed anything.
Contracting margins are thin enough that one bad site can consume the profit from four good ones, and the structure of most accounting systems makes that impossible to see until it is over.
The controls that fix this are ordinary: code every cost to a site as it is entered, budget the site before it starts, and require a signature before anything is committed.
None of this is sophisticated. It is the discipline that separates contractors who know where they stand from contractors who find out afterwards.
Materials, subcontractor bills, plant and own labour post against a site cost centre as they are entered, so the site figure builds itself rather than being reconstructed later.
Set the cost centres up as sites, packages or phases — whichever level you actually make decisions at.
Set a budget per cost centre before the job starts, and budget-versus-actual becomes a live report that feeds the executive dashboard rather than a spreadsheet built at the end.
Which is what turns an overspend into something you find in month three instead of month nine.
Purchase requests and orders routed for sign-off by value and type, with posting blocked until approved, so material ordered from site is a decision rather than a fact you discover when the invoice lands.
Whoever raises a document and whoever approves it can be two different people, and that separation is enforced.
Orders to subcontractors, receipts against them and vendor bills matched to both, clearing goods-received-not-invoiced and booking input tax as they post.
Payables aging, supplier statements and post-dated cheques all sit on the same ledger, which is most of a contractor’s cash-flow question.
There is no bill of quantities, no measurement, no progress-claim generator and no retention register that releases automatically. Valuations and claims are raised as invoices you prepare.
Retention is commonly handled as a line held back on the invoice and tracked in receivables — it works, and it is a convention rather than a feature.
Equipment and vehicles sit in fixed assets with depreciation posting itself, and hire income from plant lent to other contractors runs through the same ledger.
For an equipment-heavy contractor that removes the separate asset spreadsheet entirely.
No card, no setup call. Budget a job, code a month of costs to it, and look at the variance.
Whether you are building it, fitting it out or supplying it, the question is which job the money went to and whether that job was budgeted for it.
Main contracts with subcontractor chains, coded per site and compared to budget.
Packages within a larger job, with material and labour tracked per package.
Short fast jobs with high material content and tight variation control.
Multi-warehouse stock, delivery notes and contractor accounts on thirty days.
Materials, plants and labour against a site, with maintenance contracts after handover.
Plant on the balance sheet, hired out on account, with servicing costed against each unit.
Not a generic retail tool with a currency switch bolted on the side.
Invoices, credit notes and purchases carry VAT as you raise them, with the totals your return needs already summed. See VAT accounting software and what e-invoicing will require.
A budget per cost centre with budget-versus-actual reporting behind it, so an overspend surfaces while the job is still running.
Basic covers a single branch from AED 115 a month. Multi-branch stock and transfers start on Professional at AED 215, which covers three — see pricing.
Purchasing, payroll, stock, assets and the ledger are one platform, with cost centres running through all of them. That is what makes a per-site figure possible at all.
See the full feature listChart of accounts, journals, AR and AP, post-dated cheques, bank reconciliation and an audit trail — the ledger is here.
Site stores and a central yard as locations of the same item — see inventory.
Requests, purchase orders, sales orders and stock adjustments can each carry their own sign-off rules.
If the fleet is significant, cost per vehicle has its own shape — see transport and fleet software.
Still unsure? Send us a message — a person replies, usually the same day.
Through cost centres, yes. Set a cost centre per site and code materials, subcontractor bills, plant and labour to it as they are entered, then compare against the budget you set for that site. It depends on the coding being kept up — that is the honest condition, and it is a discipline rather than something the system infers.
No. There is no BOQ, no measurement, no valuation engine and no automatic progress billing. Claims and valuations are raised as invoices you prepare. If your contracts are run from a priced BOQ, this will not replace that, and it is much better to know before a demo.
Retention can be raised as a line held back on the invoice and tracked in receivables until it is released. What there is not is a dedicated retention register with automatic release dates — it is a convention that works rather than a built-in feature.
Yes, and it is the control most worth switching on here. Requests and orders above a value you set are held until signed off, posting is blocked until the approval completes, and whoever raises can be a different person from whoever approves.
Yes. Budgets sit against cost centres and budget-versus-actual reporting compares them as costs post, so an overspend is visible in month three rather than in the year-end accounts.
Yes, and an aged receivables list for clients. Both by bucket, with statements on either side and post-dated cheques tracked through to clearance.
Yes. Each is a location of the same item, transfers between them post on both sides, and the stock ledger holds a running quantity and value per location.
Yes. Equipment and vehicles sit in the fixed asset register with depreciation posting itself on a schedule, and hire income from plant lent out runs through the same ledger.
Yes. VAT is calculated on every purchase, invoice and credit note as you raise it, in AED, with the totals your return needs already summed.
Budget a job, code a month of real costs and subcontractor bills to it, and see the variance while the job is still running. Fourteen days free, no card, export any time.