We're choosing our first proper systems.
Jobs are won and delivered, but everything lives in spreadsheets and email. You want to choose right the first time.
Every job has a tracker — an Excel workbook that becomes "the Bible for all of our financials." Quotes live in Word, job sheets come back from engineers as photos on WhatsApp, invoicing happens when someone remembers, and the sales forecast is rebuilt by hand on the last Friday of the month.
It all works — that's the trap. It worked at 20 people. At 50 it's already creaking: two people now maintain spreadsheets full-time, nobody trusts anyone else's version, and every new hire adds another copy. You're about to buy your first serious systems, and the fear is legitimate: pick wrong, and in two years you'll be migrating with ten times the data and a team that already hates software. Half the fit-out contractors we meet at stage two are living with a decision someone made in an afternoon at stage one. The cheapest moment to get this right — the categories, the naming, the way a job is born and costed — is now, before any licence is bought.
You take the Standard Tracker and we set your data foundations inside it: cost categories, project references, how variations and retentions are recorded. This costs nothing and survives every system you'll ever buy — the structure is the asset, the software is just where it lives.
We map how a job actually moves through your business — enquiry, survey, quote, delivery, handover to service, invoice, renewal — by talking to the people who run it, not just the directors. Then we shortlist two or three stacks that fit a fit-out contractor of your size: typically a field service platform (Procore, SimPRO or BigChange class), an accounts system it talks to (Xero or Sage class), and Microsoft 365 with Power BI over the top. You get a written recommendation with three-year cost of ownership, what each option does badly (every tool does something badly), and a written reason for every tool we ruled out. We are vendor-neutral: if the honest answer is "you don't need this category yet" — that's what the report says.
Before anything is bought, the shortlist gets tested on your work, not on a sales script. We run structured demos against your own scenarios — a real enquiry, a real survey, a callout with parts, an invoice — and score each vendor on the same sheet. Then a short pilot on a live pocket of the business: one team, a handful of jobs, a trial tenant. You see how it behaves with your data and your engineers, what it can't do, and what the licence and implementation quotes really include. If a pilot fails, you've lost weeks, not a year.
The winning stack goes in one piece at a time, each piece useful on its own: jobs and engineers first — scheduling, mobile job sheets, certificates; then accounts connected, so an invoice is raised from the job, not retyped into it; then the cost structure from Step 0, so every job carries its budget and its actuals from day one. Your team is trained on real jobs, not demo data. No six-month blueprint phase, no go-live cliff.
Power BI dashboards on top of the new stack: every job, margin, engineers, cash — the workbook retires with honours. Month-end becomes a review, not a rebuild.
What you end up with: systems chosen for reasons you can re-read; jobs, engineers and invoices in one flow; cost per job from the first day; a portfolio dashboard and a month-end pack; and a data structure that won't need to be undone at 150 people.
Cost to complete, margin by project, committed vs budget and a revenue forecast — running in the free tracker before you spend a pound on software. If the tracker's discipline holds for one month, the system selection becomes ten times easier.
Every module works on its own. They all share one data spine — so anything you add later clicks in, nothing gets rebuilt.
- —Portfolio profitability, live
- —Cost to Complete by project and category
- —Estimate at Completion (EAC)
- —Margin movement month-on-month
- —Committed cost vs budget
- —Variations: identified / submitted / approved
- —Delivery vs programme
- —WIP
- —Revenue forecast: secured / probable / pipeline
- —Recurring vs project revenue mix
- —Order book & backlog coverage
- —Application → certification → cash cycle (DSO)
- —Open POs vs required-on-site dates
- —Subcontractor liabilities & accruals
- —Retention held and due
- —Engineer utilisation
- —First-time fix rate
- —Remedials → quoted works conversion
- —Contract renewal rate
- —Pipeline value, win rate and average contract value
- 01Project tracker: one live view per job
- 02Portfolio dashboard: every job, RAG, margin, cash
- 03Month-end pack: CTC, EAC, margin movement, frozen versions
- 04Variations register
- 05Programme & delivery report
- 06Procurement status: orders vs required-on-site dates
- 01WIP report
- 02Applications & certifications status
- 0313-week cash flow forecast
- 04Aged debt & DSO
- 05Retention ledger
- 06P&L by project and division
- 01Committed vs budget by project and category
- 02Cost movement since last close
- 03Subcontractor accruals & liabilities
- 01Engineer utilisation
- 02Contract profitability per maintenance contract
- 03Remedials conversion
- 01Sales forecast
- 02Pipeline & bid board
Get the Standard Tracker.
The project tracker we wish every contractor was running. One Excel file, free, no call required.
Free build: send us one file.
Send us the workbook you run jobs on today — we'll show you what it looks like as a system.
Send one spreadsheet — your project tracker or your month-end pack. Within 48 hours you get it back as a working prototype: connected, calculated, on one screen. NDA first if you want. Free, no obligation, and you keep it either way.
Or just email it to [EMAIL TBC].
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