Construction & Project Tracking Software

What a contracting firm actually loses in Excel

Nobody in a contracting business thinks spreadsheets are elegant. The reason they survive is that each one, on its own, works. The loss is at the joins between them, and it is specific enough to list.

The measurement and the claim are different files. A quantity is corrected on the takeoff sheet after the claim has gone out. The claim is not corrected, because the claim was a copy. Two months later nobody can reconstruct which version the client certified.
Nobody holds a running cumulative per contract item. The question “how much of item 15.03 have we already certified?” requires opening every previous claim and adding up. So it is answered from memory, and the answer is either an over-claim the client rejects, or an under-claim that quietly stays unbilled until the end of the job.
Retention held is not a balance anywhere. Retention is calculated inside each subcontractor claim as a deduction line. The total currently held against a given subcontractor, when it is due for release, and whether the first half was already released after provisional acceptance, exists only if someone maintains a separate sheet for it. Often the subcontractor's own sheet is more accurate than yours.
Advance amortisation drifts. An advance paid at the start is recovered as a percentage of each claim. Miss one claim, or apply the wrong percentage once, and the recovered total no longer matches the advance. This surfaces at final account, when the leverage is gone.
Material sent to site is not material consumed. Delivery notes go into a folder. Consumption is estimated at month end from what the site engineer remembers. Rebar, concrete, cable and fittings issued to a subcontractor as free-issue material should come back as a deduction on their claim; when the issue records are informal, often it does not.
Cash flow is built from dates that live in an inbox. The forecast depends on when a claim was submitted, when it was certified, and the payment term running from certification. Those dates sit in email. So the forecast is rebuilt by hand every time it is needed, and it is only as current as the last person who rebuilt it.
Committed cost is invisible. The purchase order is signed, the goods have not arrived, the invoice has not been booked. Accounting therefore shows the project as cheaper than it is, and the next commitment is made against a budget that has already been spent.

None of this is a discipline failure. It is what happens when the same figure has to be maintained in five places by hand. The general method for deciding whether a manual line is worth converting is set out in the real cost of manual work.

What this page covers, and what it does not

The scope here is the commercial and operational control of a construction or engineering contract: measurement, certification, subcontractor accounts, materials on site, and money in and out per project. Specifically:

Bill of quantities, work breakdown structure, and progress by work package
Quantity takeoff with location references, and the backup sheets behind each figure
Client progress claims and the certified cumulative position per contract item
Subcontractor contracts, claims, retention, advance amortisation and deductions
Site requisitions, purchase orders, delivery notes, material custody and free-issue tracking
Daily site diary: headcount by trade, weather, work areas open, deliveries received, photographs
Project cash flow: certified but unpaid, committed but uninvoiced, and forecast by week

It is not a design tool. Model coordination, clash detection, structural calculation and drawing revision control belong in your CAD and BIM stack, and we do not attempt to replace them. It is also not your statutory accounting system: ledgers, e-invoicing and payroll stay in the accounting package and are connected by an integration bridge. Which system owns what is set out on integrations.

How it works, screen by screen and role by role

The system is built around one rule: a figure is entered once, by the person closest to the fact, and everything downstream is derived from it. That rule determines who touches which screen.

Site engineer — mobile

Enters the daily diary and the measurement lines for work completed, each posted against a bill of quantities item and a location reference (block, floor, axis). Photographs attach to the line, not to a folder. Delivery notes are recorded on arrival, with quantity and the subcontractor the material is issued to. Designed to be usable in a few minutes on a phone, and offline where the site has no signal.

Quantity surveyor — measurement and claims

Reviews site measurements, adds their own takeoff, and sees for every contract item: contracted quantity, previously certified, this period, cumulative, remaining. Generates the claim period from that state rather than assembling it. Variation orders are separate items with their own rates, so the original contract position stays readable after a dozen variations.

Project manager — packages and subcontractors

Owns the work packages, the subcontractor contracts underneath them, and the approval of subcontractor claims. Sees budget against committed against actual per package, not only per project, which is the level at which an overrun can still be acted on.

Procurement and warehouse

Turns site requisitions into purchase orders with an approval chain by amount, matches deliveries against orders, and records what left the central store for which site. Free-issue material handed to a subcontractor is booked as a custody record, and that record is what later produces the deduction on their claim.

Finance — the deduction chain

Every claim, client or subcontractor, runs the same computed sequence: gross value of work to date at contract rates, less previously certified, gives the period value; then advance amortisation, retention at the contractual rate, contra-charges for free-issue material and site services, contractual penalties, and statutory withholding where it applies, giving the net payable. Each line shows the rule that produced it.

Executive — portfolio

Across all active projects: certified but unpaid, retention held and retention due for release, committed cost not yet invoiced, and the weekly cash position that follows from those. This is the layer that connects to business intelligence when you want the same figures alongside the rest of the group.

What makes retention and amortisation reliable is not clever arithmetic; it is that they are computed from stored contract terms at claim time instead of being typed in as deduction lines. The rate lives on the subcontract record. When the claim is generated the rate is applied, and the resulting balance is posted to a retention ledger that can be queried, aged and released.

Spreadsheets and generic project tools against a purpose-built system

General-purpose task tools are good at tasks. Construction commercial control is not a task list, and the gap shows on specific criteria rather than in general.

Criterion	Spreadsheets + generic project tool	Purpose-built project system
Cumulative certified quantity per contract item	Reconstructed by opening previous claims and adding up	A stored running balance; over-claim is blocked at entry
Retention held per subcontractor	A deduction line inside each claim; no balance unless someone keeps a separate sheet	A ledger with amounts, release conditions and ageing
Advance amortisation	Percentage applied by hand each period; drifts silently	Computed from the contract term until the advance is fully recovered
Material issued to a subcontractor	Delivery note in a folder; recovery depends on someone remembering	Custody record that generates the contra-charge on the next claim
Committed cost	Not visible until the supplier invoice is booked	Purchase order value counted against the package budget from approval
Cash flow forecast	Rebuilt by hand from dates held in email	Derived from certification dates and payment terms already in the system
Site data capture	Photographs in a chat group, diary in a notebook	Entries posted against the contract item and the location, timestamped
Cost of adding site staff and subcontractor logins	A licence decision every time	No per-user fee; the licence is perpetual and the source code is yours

When this is the wrong thing to build

We would rather say this before the quote than after the invoice.

One small project at a time, lump sum, no measurement. If your contracts are not measured against a bill of quantities and you run one site with two subcontractors, a spreadsheet and your accounting package are genuinely adequate. This system earns its cost through repetition across projects and claim periods.
The measurement discipline does not exist on site. Software cannot invent data that nobody records. If site staff do not currently measure and record work as it is completed, fix that practice first; the system will then hold it. Building the system first produces empty screens and an argument about the software.
You want design and model coordination. Clash detection, model federation and drawing revision workflows are a different product category with mature tools. We integrate with them where it helps; we do not rebuild them.
Your real problem is statutory reporting. If the pain is tax, e-invoice formats or payroll, that is an accounting package question. This system feeds accounting; it does not replace it.
Every project is genuinely unique with no repeating structure. If no two contracts share a rate structure, a claim format or a deduction rule, you will spend the budget encoding exceptions. Automate the parts that do repeat and leave the rest manual — the same test we apply in business process automation.

How a build starts

One contract, one claim cycle

We take a real contract, a real bill of quantities and the last claim you issued, and reproduce that claim in the system. If the net payable does not match the figure you actually certified, the model is wrong and we fix it before anything else is built. This takes days rather than weeks, and it settles most of the specification.
Prototype in the first 2 weeks

Clickable screens for the roles above, with your own item codes and rates in them, so the quantity surveyor and the site engineer can say what is missing while changing it is still cheap.
First module in production, 2–4 weeks

Usually claims and measurement, because that is where the money is disputed. It runs in parallel with your spreadsheets for one or two claim periods until the two agree, then the spreadsheets stop.
Add the next layer

Subcontractor accounts and retention, then site materials and custody, then cash flow and the portfolio view. Each is a separate scope with its own price. A focused module is $3,000–6,000 over 2–4 weeks; a full multi-project system is $8,000–15,000 over 4–8 weeks. The bands are on pricing.

You receive the source code and the database schema. The licence is perpetual with unlimited users, so adding site engineers, subcontractor logins or a second office is not a commercial decision. Annual maintenance is optional at 12–25% of build cost. Why that matters over a five-year horizon is argued in code ownership and lock-in and priced out in total cost of ownership.

What we have actually built

Two points of honesty here. Elevatora PROJE, our own project tracking system, is in development. It is not running in production and we do not present it as a live reference. What is in production is adjacent work that shares the same mechanics — jobs, materials issued against a job, cost accumulated per job: Elevatora SAHA, a multi-tenant lift maintenance and field service system, and Elevatora İMALAT, a manufacturing and ERP system for lift components. We have also built SEMP Group, a group-wide operations platform, SmartHukuk, our own legal technology product, and a pharmaceutical import and export process tracking system. Descriptions are on cases, and the related operational systems on field service and manufacturing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a progress claim and why does standard accounting software not handle it?

A progress claim, called hakediş in Turkish contracting practice, is a periodic statement of the work executed so far, measured against the bill of quantities, priced at contract rates, and reduced by advance amortisation, retention, penalties and previously certified amounts. Accounting software records the resulting invoice. It does not hold the measurement behind that invoice, the cumulative claimed quantity per contract item, or the deduction chain that produced the net figure. That reasoning is exactly what gets disputed, so it needs to live in a system rather than in an attachment.

How does the system stop a contract item from being over-claimed?

Every measurement line is posted against a specific bill of quantities item, so the system holds the contracted quantity, the cumulative certified quantity and the remaining balance for that item at all times. When a new measurement would push the cumulative figure past the contracted quantity, it is blocked or flagged for a variation order instead of quietly passing into the claim. The same running balance works in the other direction: items that are under-claimed relative to physical progress become visible rather than forgotten.

Can site staff record work where there is no mobile signal?

Yes, if the site diary and measurement screens are built as an offline-capable web app. The forms, the current bill of quantities items and the open work packages are cached on the device, entries and photos are stored locally, and they sync when the device regains a connection. This matters on basement levels, in shafts and on rural sites. Offline capability is a design decision made at the start of the build, not a switch enabled afterwards.

Do we have to replace our accounting package?

No. Statutory accounting, e-invoicing and payroll stay where they are. The project system owns the operational layer that the accounting package has no model for: measurement, certification, retention held per subcontractor, material custody on site and committed cost. The two are connected by an integration bridge, so approved claims and supplier invoices reach accounting as postings without anyone re-keying them, and payments recorded in accounting close the loop back onto the project ledger.

How long does the first module take and what does it cost?

A single focused module, for example client progress claims against one project's bill of quantities, is $3,000–6,000 and reaches production in 2–4 weeks, with a clickable prototype in the first 2 weeks. A multi-project system covering claims, subcontractor accounts, site materials and cash flow is $8,000–15,000 over 4–8 weeks. Annual maintenance is optional at 12–25% of the build cost, and there is no per-user fee.

Do you have a live construction reference?

Not yet, and we will not claim one. Elevatora PROJE, our own project tracking system, is in development and is not running in production, so we present it as work in progress rather than as a reference. What is live is adjacent: Elevatora SAHA, a multi-tenant maintenance and field service system, and Elevatora İMALAT, a manufacturing and ERP system for lift components. Both handle the same underlying mechanics of work orders, materials issued against a job, and cost accumulated per job.

The claim, the measurement and the subcontractor ledger in one place