Construction management: the new complete guide.

Welcome to Codeblix Construction: everything you need to know to master construction management. We'll follow one real building job, from an empty system, to estimating, buying, paying, reporting, and your own AI assistant. This is your new construction app. Right now, it's completely empty. No projects, no money, nothing yet. But look at the top: a setup checklist with seven steps, ready to guide you. Everything lives in the menu on the left. Estimating holds your resources and schedule of rates. Purchasing holds requisitions, orders and deliveries. Accounting holds invoices, payments, bank and journals. And the New button at the top creates any document, from any page. Here is the life of every construction project, in seven steps. Set up your company. Build your library of costs and rates. Price the BOQ. Start the project. Buy materials. Pay your suppliers. And finally, track and report. Each step feeds the next one, so you never type the same thing twice. Part one. Set up your company. Open Settings. Every setting is grouped here: company and people, purchasing, tax, and accounting. Start with Company. Type your company name, business registration number, VAT number and address. Your logo goes under Appearance, and it shows on every order you print. Then press Save. Step two on the checklist: the chart of accounts. This is the list of every account your money can go to. You don't need to type it. Press Import chart, and drop in the Excel file from your accountant or your old system. Codeblix shows a preview first, and keeps your own codes exactly. Your accounts arrive in groups: liabilities, assets, contract revenue, and your construction costs, like materials, plant hire, wages and subcontractors. Group headings only add up their children. Money is posted to the accounts underneath. Next, account roles. This tells Codeblix which account to use when it posts for you, automatically. Pick your main bank, your trade creditors for suppliers, VAT input and VAT output, stock, and withholding tax. Do this once, and every invoice and payment lands in the right place. Under Tax rates, you'll find VAT at fifteen percent, plus zero rated and exempt. Withholding tax for subcontractors is here too, at three percent. Then set your financial year. Only open periods accept postings, so a closed month stays closed. Now, material categories. Each category points to its cost account. Cement goes to cement, blocks go to blockwork, steel goes to reinforcing steel. So when you buy cement later, the cost books itself to the right account, and to the right project. Add your suppliers. One at a time, or import the whole list from Excel. For each one: the name, VAT number, phone, bank account and payment terms, like thirty days. For a subcontractor, tick withholding tax, and it's deducted for you when you pay. Now invite your team. Each person signs in with their own account. Give each person a role. The director sees everything. The quantity surveyor prices the BOQ. The project manager approves site requests. Site staff request materials. Procurement places orders. The site receiver checks deliveries, and the accountant handles bills and payments. Then choose their projects. Site people only see their own sites, and they see quantities, not money. Approvals decide who signs off each document. By default, one person can prepare and approve their own work. If you want a second person to check it, just switch it on. You can also ask the director to approve big orders, for example above five hundred thousand rupees. And under Numbering, choose your prefixes: REQ, PO, GRN, and so on. Part two. Build your library of costs and rates. Before you can price a job, the system needs your costs. These are your resources. They come in groups: labour, materials, plant, and subcontract. Each one has a unit, like a bag, an hour, or a cubic metre. The national schedule of rates gives you a minimum and a maximum. Your company cost sits next to it, and that's what your prices use. Click a cell to change it, or paste a whole column straight from Excel. The schedule of rates is your price list for work, like excavation per cubic metre, or blockwork per square metre. It's grouped just like a BOQ: trade, then section, then item. Collapse a group to see the big picture. When you're happy with a company rate, approve it. Only approved rates can be used in a BOQ. Now the heart of estimating: the rate build-up. Let's build one rate, for grade thirty concrete, per cubic metre. First, the materials. Ready mix concrete, with five percent waste, and a waterproofing admixture. Then the labour: a mason and two labourers' hours for every cubic metre. Then the plant: the concrete pump and a poker vibrator. Add transport, and small tools. That gives the direct cost: five thousand, four hundred and fifty rupees. Add five percent overheads, and five percent profit, and your selling rate is six thousand and eight rupees. Change any price later, and the whole rate recalculates itself. Part three. Create the project, and price the BOQ. Press New, then Project. Give it a short code and a name. Our job is Palm Grove Villas, code P G V. Add the client, the site, the contract value, the start and finish dates, and the approved budget. Press Create project. Next, the structure of the building. Levels are the floors: substructure, ground floor, first floor and roof. Work sections are the trades: concrete, blockwork, finishes. Every BOQ item will sit on one level, in one section. That's how you'll see your costs, floor by floor. Your client sends the BOQ in Excel. There's no need to retype it. Import takes three steps. Upload the file. Match the columns: item number, description, unit, quantity and rate. Then check and import. Any line without a rate is flagged, so nothing slips through. Here is the priced BOQ. Every item, with its unit, quantity, rate and amount. Each section adds up on its own line, and you can collapse it to see only the totals. Switch between level and work section, to see the same job in two different ways. And the filters find problems fast: missing rates, or items with no breakdown. Your client sees one rate per line. But you need to see what's inside it. Click View breakdown. Now every part of the rate is open: materials, labour, plant, transport, tools, waste, overheads and profit. The bar shows where the money goes. For this concrete, three quarters is the material itself. Below, the rate is multiplied by the quantity. Sixty four cubic metres gives the full cost of each part, for this one item. Your cost, your selling price, and your margin, all side by side. The same item often appears in many places. Grade thirty concrete is in the bases, the slabs and the columns. Because they share one code, Codeblix adds them up for you: ninety four cubic metres for the whole job. And it splits that into what you must buy: ready mix, admixture, pump hire and labour hours. No more Excel. When the BOQ is ready, press Submit, then Approve. Now it's locked, and it becomes the project budget. Each material on each floor gets its own allowance. From now on, the system tracks three numbers for every item: approved, ordered, and remaining. Need a change later? Make a revision or a variation. The approved version is never overwritten. Part four. Buy materials: request, order, and receive. On site, the foreman needs cement for the ground floor blockwork. He raises a purchase requisition. He picks the project, the level, and the BOQ item. The system shows what's left: six hundred bags approved, none ordered yet. He asks for two hundred and fifty bags, needed by Monday, and submits. The project manager approves it, and those bags are now reserved. What if someone asks for more than the BOQ allows? The system stops it, and says why. Instead, press Ask QS for more. The quantity surveyor raises a variation, with the reason and the cost. Once it's approved, the extra quantity can be ordered. Nothing is ever bought outside the budget by accident. Procurement opens Purchase orders and presses New order. The approved requests are waiting. Tick the cement, and choose the supplier. The quantity and the BOQ link come across automatically. Enter the price: two hundred and eighty five rupees a bag. VAT is added at fifteen percent. If a price is above the BOQ rate, it's flagged in red, before anyone approves it. Approve it, download the PDF, and send it to the supplier. The QR code on it is for the delivery. The truck arrives on site. The receiver opens Record delivery on a phone, and scans the QR code on the order. He counts the bags. Two hundred and fifty delivered, but ten are torn. So he accepts two hundred and forty, marks ten as damaged, adds the delivery note number and a photo. Submit and approve. This is your goods received note, or GRN. Only the good bags count. Part five. The supplier's invoice, and paying it. The supplier's bill arrives. Open Supplier invoices. Under Ready to invoice, the approved delivery is already waiting. Press Enter invoice, and type the supplier's invoice number and date. The lines fill in from the delivery. Now, the three way match. The order, the delivery and the invoice are compared: quantity, price, VAT, total, and duplicate numbers. All green. We pay for two hundred and forty bags, not two hundred and fifty. Before posting, you see exactly what goes into the books. The cement cost goes to the cement account, for project P G V. The VAT goes to VAT input. And the total goes to trade creditors: what we owe the supplier. Debits equal credits. Press Post. Your accountant never types this twice. Some bills have no order, like a subcontractor's monthly bill. Use Bill without order. Choose the project and the cost account, so the cost still lands on the right job. For a subcontractor, withholding tax of three percent is worked out for you. When the invoice is due, open Payments and press Pay supplier. Pick the supplier, tick the invoices to pay, and choose the bank account. If withholding tax applies, the bank amount is the invoice less the tax. Approve the payment, and mark it as paid. What you owe the supplier goes back to zero. Open Bank to see your balance, and every movement in your cashbook. Import your bank statement, and match each line to your entries. Matched payments are marked as paid by themselves. Spend money and Receive money are here too, for anything without an invoice. Journals show every posting in the ledger, grouped by day. Most of them were made for you, by invoices and payments. You can still write a journal by hand. And a posted journal is never edited. You correct it with a reversing journal, so your history is always safe. Booked a cost to the wrong project? Use Cost reallocations to move it, with a clear trail. Part six. Track your money, and your reports. Each month, the client's engineer certifies the work done. Record it on the project's Certificates tab. Certificate number one: one point two million rupees certified, with five percent retention held back. Now Codeblix can compare what you earned against what you spent. Open the project overview. This bar tells the whole story. What you've spent. What's held in stock. Orders not yet delivered. And what's not yet committed. Together, they make your forecast final cost. Compare it with the BOQ budget, and you know today if the job will be over or under. Back on the dashboard, the checklist is complete, and every number is alive. Where the money stands: BOQ budget, actual cost, certified, and margin. And Needs attention lists what to do today: approvals waiting, bills falling due, and projects going over. Reports are written as questions, so you pick the one you need. Project cost: is each BOQ item within budget? Buying: what has arrived, and what is still to come? Suppliers: what do we owe, and when is it due? Your accountant gets the trial balance, the general ledger, profit and loss, and the balance sheet. Filter by project or date, and export to Excel or PDF in one click. Here's projected versus actual purchases. Every BOQ item: the budget, what's ordered, what's left, and the difference. Green is within budget. Red, in brackets, is over. You spot a problem the same day, not at the end of the year. Part seven. Meet your AI assistant. This is where Codeblix changes everything. This is not a chatbot. It's a new member of your team. Every company gets one AI staff member. In Settings, open AI assistant. Give it a name, like Max, and a photo. Then choose its job title and its voice. Choose what Max can do: guide your team, answer questions, prepare work and check your accounts. And Max always follows each person's permissions. Here's the best part. You don't need to remember a single menu. Click Ask Max at the top, and Max opens. It already knows your company, your projects, and what you're allowed to see. Think of it as a construction and accounting expert sitting right next to you, 24/7. Ask it anything, in plain English. Where do I record a supplier invoice? It answers in two short steps, and gives you a button. One click, and you're on the right screen. Let's watch it work. Kevin, the quantity surveyor, has just received a new BOQ from the client, in Excel. Kevin asks: can you set up this BOQ for me? The assistant replies: yes. Do you want me to do it? Upload your Excel file. It reads every row, matches the items to your schedule of rates, and works out the totals. Three items need a rate, and two units are unclear, so it tells Kevin exactly which rows. Nothing is saved until he reviews it. Next, Priya in procurement. She asks two things at once: which orders are late, and order the rest of the cement for the ground floor. The assistant finds two late deliveries, with the supplier, the date, and how many days late. Each one opens with a click. Then it checks the BOQ. Three hundred and fifty bags are left, so it prepares a requisition for exactly that. Never more than the budget allows. Priya checks it, and presses Confirm. Done. The requisition is created, with a link to open it. Finally, Leena, the accountant. Before closing November, she asks: check this month for me. In seconds, it goes through every invoice, payment and bank line. And it finds what a tired eye can miss. A supplier bill entered twice. An invoice for more steel than was delivered. Two bank lines not matched. And a subcontractor bill without withholding tax. Every finding comes with the evidence, and a link to fix it. Leena closes the month with confidence, from clean books. And Anita, the director? She just asks: how is Palm Grove doing? Show me a chart. One message gives her the forecast, the chart, what is over budget, and a report to download. And Max goes everywhere you go. On site, open the app on your phone, and just speak, like you talk to your staff. Max, the blocks from Island Hardware just arrived. Two hundred blocks, and ten are broken. Record it for me. Got it. I've prepared the delivery: 200 delivered, 190 accepted, 10 damaged. Shall I add a photo and send it for approval? One tap to confirm. No typing, no menus. Just like a member of your team. And your data stays yours. The assistant only works inside your company, and only with what your role allows. Ask it for another company's data, and the answer is simply no. And Max never acts alone. It prepares the work, you decide. Nothing is approved, paid or posted without a person. One assistant, for every person in your team, every hour of the day. Fewer mistakes, faster work, and an expert always at your side. That's Codeblix. So here's the full cycle, one more time. The BOQ sets the budget. Site requests the materials. Procurement orders them. The receiver checks the delivery. Accounts matches the invoice, and pays it. And every step updates your project cost, live. You're ready to build. Need help? We're always here for you, at codeblix.com.