A site engineer photographs a cracked shuttering panel, posts it to a group and gets back to the pour. By evening the photo is buried under the day’s messages and nobody in the office has ordered a replacement. Construction software has to catch that moment and put it in front of someone who can act.
Most construction firms are not short of information. The daily progress report, the indent for steel, the delivery challan, the subcontractor’s running bill and the photos of last week’s slab all exist somewhere. They live on different phones, in different sheets and in the heads of different people, and the connection between them gets lost on the way from site to office.
When we build for a construction business, that connection is where we start. An indent should know which project and which BOQ item it belongs to. A delivery should be checked against the indent it fulfils. A contractor’s bill should be measured against work someone actually recorded. Once those links hold, most of the reports management asks for come straight out of records people were already making.
Who uses the tool shapes it as much as what it records. A supervisor with dusty hands, patchy signal and a concrete truck due in twenty minutes needs a couple of taps and an offline save. A project manager reviewing indents at night needs the context on one screen. A director comparing sites needs every project to record the same things the same way.
Usually the first workflow we’d build, because so many other reports lean on it.
A supervisor raises an indent on their phone with the project, item, quantity, required-by date and a photo if it helps. It saves without signal and syncs once the phone reconnects.
The project manager sees the request against budgeted quantities and what is already on order, then approves, edits or rejects it. Higher-value requests can go to a second approver.
Purchasing raises the supplier order and records the expected delivery. The site can see the request moving without ringing anyone.
The storekeeper records what arrived against the order with a photo of the challan. A short or damaged delivery stays open on the original request.
Requests come in by phone and chat, the purchase sheet is updated in a batch at the end of the day, and nobody can quickly say which deliveries are still short.
Each request carries its project, approval and delivery status. Billing can see what was received and measured before releasing a payment, and every decision is kept in an audit trail.
Yes. Each project keeps its own indents, stock and progress, while management sees all of them side by side in the same format.
They can, through a limited login that shows only their work orders on their sites. Your engineer then verifies what they submit before it counts towards a bill.
It doesn’t have to. Purchase orders and approved bills can flow to your accounting system where it allows an import or a connection, and accounts carries on as it does now.
How we design field apps that stay usable on a site with weak signal.
Read more Business needWhen the purchase register has outgrown the sheet it lives in.
Read more IndustryIf you also sell what you build, the sales record matters as much as the site one.
Read moreTell us how indents move today and where they stall, and we’ll suggest the smallest useful first release.