Case Study – Billing Management in Construction

Script Monkey senior management has decades of construction contracting experience and is thus ideally placed to help contractors automate their billing systems.

A well-known construction company had grown over 20 years into a player in the Mechanical Services space. Systems had evolved with the company as it grew but were starting to fail as the company turnover exceeded tens of millions with 20-30 concurrent projects varying in size working for 20+ clients.

The workflow that had evolved was a combination of a professional accounting software, an incredibly complex, but functional Excel spreadsheet and a great deal of manual and email correspondence between accountants, surveyors, project management and senior management. In any given month, hundreds of communications and reports were manually created by different business functions to allow the billing to take place.

The burden on staff to remember to follow-up on certain dates, to chase certifications, payments or remittance advice was never ending and sometimes things were missed.

After detailed review with all of the concerned roles, a system was specified as follows:

  • Projects could be configured for automatic billing.
  • VAT status and percentage for projects could be configured.
  • Self-billing for some clients could be configured.
  • Client lookup and email contacts could be configured.
  • Monthly, the system would automatically create a billing entry for each project configured to bill.
  • Ad-hoc billing was also provided for one-off bills to small jobs, or agreed one off payments for any job, i.e. retention, final account, EoT payments, defects period charges etc.
  • Accounting package queried direct via API for each project to give costs to date and cost to prior month to allow surveyors to ensure they had claimed all costs in the current month.
  • For ad-hoc payments, system simply asked for invoice description and amount.
  • Surveyor enters application (claimed) value and VAT which matches the application PDF.
  • Once approved or after being revised by management request, signed PDF submitted directly to client representative from within the system as email attachment. PDF Application available on demand for future audit purposes.
  • Once certificate received, it is added to the billing entry and remains there for future audit.
  • Certified figures entered and a management tool created for differences.
  • When payment received, remittances also added to system for future audit and multiple remittances must total the certified amount, otherwise a statement tool allows for chasing client payment deficits.
  • Dates for applications, certificates and remittances are calculated in system, based on excerpts from the project contract. All also customizable in case client changes terms by agreement.
  • Payment history report gives true picture of client payment habits throughout lifecycle of each project, or across multiple projects to allow future cashflow planning.
  • Due payments and other management tools built into system.
  • Emails and actions staff roles handled in-system to ensure every action is traceable and logged.

The result of all the above is a simple, self-contained billing system where all information needed to bill is available by the different roles without having to ask. Management or accounts can go back to any billing month for any project and see copies of certificates, applications and remittances providing the perfect audit trail.