The margin on a job, protected from site instruction to final account.

Margin leaks between the site and the invoice.

A variation is instructed on site and priced weeks later, if at all. The monthly claim is rebuilt from last month's spreadsheet. Retention waits in a column nobody reconciles until the defects period ends, so the release goes out late or never. Meanwhile a subcontractor's licence or insurance certificate expires quietly in a shared folder.

Each of these is a record kept late or not at all, and each one is paid for at the final account.

Contract paperwork read, checked and chased on a rule.

• Subcontractor papers read and chased. Trade licences, insurance certificates and IDs arrive through a portal and are read into fields with their expiry dates, each read carrying a confidence score. Renewals are chased before cover lapses, and a person approves the subcontractor. Document automation.
• Signed, numbered variations. Each change becomes a numbered order with its scope and price, and the client signs it in the browser. The record keeps who agreed what, and on which date. Client portals & e-signature.
• Claims from measured work. The monthly statement is built from quantities measured against the bill of quantities, plus signed variations. When the certificate comes back, its amount is recorded against the claim and any shortfall is visible that day.
• Retention in its own ledger. Deducted at the rate your contract states on each interim payment, then released by invoice at each point the contract sets, such as taking over and the end of the defects period, with a reminder ahead of each one.
• Material invoices matched. Supplier invoices and delivery notes read and checked against the purchase order and what arrived at site. A mismatch waits for a person instead of being paid.
• Job cost underneath. Budget, commitments and actuals per project in ERPNext, the ledger the rest of this reads from, so the margin on a job is known while there is still time to protect it. CRM & ERP on ERPNext.

FIDIC payment terms map straight onto the record.

Where your contract follows a FIDIC form, the payment cycle is already a sequence of documents. Under the Red Book the contractor submits a Statement and the Engineer certifies an Interim Payment Certificate. Retention is deducted under Sub-Clause 14.3 and released under Sub-Clause 14.9: typically half on the Taking-Over Certificate and the rest when the Defects Notification Period expires.

Each of those carries a date and a figure, so each becomes a record: the statement you sent, the certificate you received, the difference between them, and the retention balance still owed. A contract written on its own terms gets the same four records, set to its clauses.

In the UAE, invoices between businesses fall under the e-invoicing mandate, and progress billing with retention is where invoice templates usually break. Your tax adviser decides the VAT treatment of each claim and each retention release. We apply that answer identically on every certificate and make the system ready for PINT AE.

Safety systems and design work stay out of scope.

We take on nothing life-safety critical. That rules out site-safety systems, structural or design calculations, and any automated decision where an error could injure somebody. Your planning software and design models stay where they are, and we do not integrate with them. The record sits beside the programme and holds the money, the documents and the approvals.

One live project first, then the rest.

• Contract audit. We read one live project's contract, bill of quantities, last three claims, variation log and retention schedule.
• Rules. Rates, the retention percentage and cap, who may approve a variation, and who certifies what.
• Build and migrate. Open projects moved into a staging copy, with claims to date reconciled against the certificates received.
• Parallel claim. One monthly claim produced both ways until the figures agree.
• Live, then the next project. Further projects move across one at a time.

Our own terms hold us to the same discipline: one fixed price against a signed scope, and a numbered change order if the scope moves. How we work has the steps.