Your accounting software can do all of this. It was set up by someone who had never run a construction job.
So it tracks nothing at job level. Every cost lands in one pot called materials or subcontractors, and at the month end you know what you spent without knowing which job spent it. CIS is switched off, so someone is working out deductions on a calculator and typing the return into HMRC by hand. The reverse charge gets applied invoice by invoice from memory, which means it is applied wrongly some of the time.
None of that is the software’s fault. A generic setup produces generic figures, and construction is the wrong trade for those.
The background on cloud accounting in construction is covered elsewhere on the site. This page is about getting your system configured for the way you work.
What a generic setup costs you
A chart of accounts written for a shop. Sales at the top, costs underneath, nothing that separates labour from subcontractors or plant from materials. Every management figure you pull out of it afterwards is built on that.
No job or project tracking. Without it you cannot see what a job made until it is finished and somebody adds up the invoices by hand, by which point you have priced the next one off a guess.
CIS off. Deductions calculated manually every month, statements typed out separately, and a return keyed straight into HMRC with nothing in your records to check it against.
Reverse charge applied by judgement. A contact or an item set up with the wrong default tax treatment produces wrong invoices quietly, for months, until a customer queries one.
Receipts arriving in a carrier bag. Material invoices that nobody codes to a job are worth little. You know the spend happened, and not where.
No bank rules. Somebody reconciles the same fuel card and the same builders merchant payments line by line every week, when the software could have done it.
What is included
- Chart of accounts rebuilt for construction, so labour, subcontractors, materials, plant hire and site costs are visible separately
- Job or project tracking set up, with costs and sales landing against the job as they are entered
- CIS configured in the software, so deductions calculate on the invoice, statements come out of the system, and the return is filed from your own records
- Reverse charge VAT set up on contacts and items so it applies automatically instead of being decided each time
- Receipt capture connected, using Dext, so material invoices are photographed on site and coded to the right job
- Bank feeds connected and rules built for your recurring suppliers
- Opening balances brought over correctly where you are moving from another system
- Training for whoever does the day to day, with a written note of the setup so it survives them leaving
- A review a few weeks in, to fix what is being coded wrongly before it becomes a year of it
How it works
- First call. We look at what you are running now and what you are doing outside it on spreadsheets.
- We agree the job structure. How you want work grouped, and how far down you want to see cost.
- We rebuild the chart of accounts and set up job tracking. CIS and the reverse charge treatments go on at the same time.
- We connect the bank feeds and receipt capture, and build rules for the suppliers you use every week.
- We train whoever does the day to day, at their desk, on your live records rather than a demo.
- We review it a few weeks later and correct the coding that has drifted, adjusting the setup where your way of working does not match what we assumed.
Who this is for
UK construction limited companies turning over between £500,000 and £5 million. Firms already on cloud software that is not earning its keep, and firms moving off desktop software or spreadsheets.
We work in Xero, with Dext for receipt capture. If you are on something else we will tell you honestly whether it is worth moving.
It is not for you if nobody in the business will enter anything week by week. Job level reporting needs the costs to arrive while the job is live. A system fed once a quarter is a compliance record and will never tell you what a job made while you can still act on it.
Common questions
Do we have to move to Xero?
No. We work in it every day and it handles CIS and the reverse charge well once configured. If you are settled on another system we will look at what it can be made to do.
Will this track our jobs properly?
Yes, that is most of the point. How far down the detail goes is a decision we make with you, because tracking every doorframe separately creates work nobody will keep up with.
Who does the day to day afterwards?
Usually your office. We set it up, train whoever runs it, and stay behind them. Where you would rather we did the bookkeeping as well, we can.
We already have Xero and it is a mess. Can it be fixed?
Usually. We look at how far back the coding is wrong and tell you whether we are correcting history or drawing a line and starting clean from a date.
Will the CIS return actually file from the software?
That is how we set it up, so the deduction calculated on the invoice is the figure that goes to HMRC.
Book a call and give us read access to your current file for twenty minutes beforehand. We will come to the call with a list of what is set up wrongly, whether or not you go ahead.
Common questions
Which software do you use?
Xero, set up around CIS and job costing rather than bolted on afterwards. Most construction companies we take on already have Xero and are using perhaps a third of it, with the CIS side either switched off or being worked around by hand.
Do I have to change systems to work with you?
No, but we will tell you honestly if what you have is costing you time. If your current setup means someone rekeys subcontractor invoices every month, that is a cost even though it does not appear on any invoice.