Equipment and Plant handbook

The plant department owns the firm's machines — excavators, cranes, mixers, generators, vehicles — and makes sure each one is in the right place, working, maintained, and paying its way.

A single register holds every asset, whether the firm owns it or hires it in from a supplier. From that register you allocate plant to projects, record the hours it runs, schedule its servicing, hire it out to earn income, and see at a glance where it physically is and who currently holds it. Every action is recorded once and flows to whoever needs it — the site that booked the machine, the finance team that carries its cost, the dashboard that shows utilisation.

Because ConstruC is department-first, the plant team sees its own world — the fleet, bookings, usage, maintenance, hires — while the money lives with Finance and the works with Site. What makes the platform strong is where those worlds meet.

The one idea to hold onto. A machine is an asset with a location, a cost and an income. The register records each fact once — where it is, who has it, what it ran, what it cost, what it earned — so the firm can always answer the two questions that matter: where is every machine right now, and is it making or losing money?

---

Every asset follows the same rhythm, from the day it enters the register to the day it retires.

1. Register it — add the asset once: tag, category, ownership, rates and home base. It joins the fleet as available.
2. Book it to a job — allocate it to a project for a date range, with an operator. Two jobs can't book the same machine at once.
3. Run it and log usage — record the hours or units it works. That is the cost driver, and it feeds the day's plant cost.
4. Keep it serviced — schedule and carry out maintenance. While it is being serviced it is off the available list.
5. Hire in or hire out — short of a machine? Hire one in from a supplier. Spare capacity? Hire yours out for income.
6. Always know where it is — the tracking board shows every asset's current holder and location.
7. See what it earns — the fleet P&L nets each machine's income against its running cost.

FIG 2.1 — the plant lifecycle: register once, then book, run, maintain, hire and track; each step updates cost, status and the P&L live.

---

Plant touches almost every department: it works on Site, its money lives in Finance, it is hired from the same suppliers Procurement uses, and it is scheduled alongside the programme.

FIG 3.1 — the link map. Solid = pushed to; dotted = comes in.

Your data stays yours. The fleet is plant-owned: a lead in another department can't open your register writes, bookings or usage unless the action is theirs to take. The money side — hiring plant and the fleet P&L — is gated to the plant and finance teams (and firm-wide oversight), so a design or a site lead can never post a plant payable or move income onto a project's books.

---

One list of every machine the firm can put to work, owned or hired. Each asset carries a unique asset tag, a name and category, optional make/model/serial, and an ownership — Owned (the firm's own plant) or Hired (rented in from a supplier). You set its default rate (per hour or per day) used to cost usage, an optional hire-out rate used when you rent it to others, its home base, and — for owned plant — its purchase cost, residual value and useful life so the P&L can depreciate it. The firm can add its own custom fields.

The register keeps a live count of the fleet — total, available, and the utilisation percentage — which flows straight to the equipment dashboard.

Owned vs hired — it changes the money. Ownership isn't just a label. Owned plant can have its running cost posted to the ledger and can be hired out for income. Hired plant already has a cost — the supplier's invoice — so ConstruC deliberately won't let you post usage cost on top of it (that would count the same rental twice).

---

The question a plant manager is asked most — where's the machine? — has one screen that answers it. The tracking board shows every asset, its current holder, until when, and where it physically sits.

For each machine, ConstruC works out who holds it right now and states it plainly: on site with a named project, on hire to a customer or another project, in maintenance, or idle in the yard. Alongside sits a free-text location that the site or plant team can update as the machine moves. The board totals the fleet by where it is: on site, out on hire, idle.

FIG 5.1 — how the board decides a machine's holder: a hire outranks a booking, which outranks idle; each row shows the location and the return date.

A machine can't be in two places. You can't allocate an asset to a project for dates when it's already out on hire, and you can't hire out an asset that's already booked to a project for overlapping dates. When a hire ends, marking it returned frees the machine back to the yard — unless something else still holds it.

---

An allocation books a machine to a project for a date range, with an operator. You book an asset to a project from a start date to an end date, optionally naming the operator (a person or a rate-book resource) and a rate. The moment you book it, the machine shows as allocated and its home project updates.

No double-booking. If a machine is already booked for a window, ConstruC won't let a second job book it for overlapping dates — and it also checks it isn't out on hire. The booking always uses the project you're working in, so a machine can never be quietly booked onto a project you don't have access to.

---

A usage log records the hours or units a machine worked. It is the cost driver — and it is deliberately careful about when it becomes a real cost in the books.

Each log captures the date, the hours (or units), a rate, and optional fuel and operator. ConstruC computes the cost as hours by rate, taking the rate from the log, the asset's default rate, or its linked rate-book resource — in that order. Every log updates the day's plant-cost and plant-hours figures on the dashboard.

By default a usage log is a status figure only — not yet posted to Finance. A manager then explicitly posts owned-plant usage to the ledger, where it becomes one actual cost on the project.

FIG 7.1 — usage to cost: every log feeds the dashboard, but only owned-plant usage can be posted to the books, and only once.

A machine with no rate costs nothing. The rate comes from the log, then the asset's default rate, then its linked rate-book resource. With none of the three the log is still accepted — the hours are real — but it computes no cost and cannot be posted. The row says No rate set and the action says Set a rate on the asset to post, because hours the job will never be charged for should not look like hours already dealt with.

Why hired plant is blocked here. When you hire a machine in, the supplier's charge is already the cost. If you also posted usage against it, the same rental would hit the books twice. Posting is also idempotent — a second attempt on the same log never writes a second cost.

---

Keeping machines serviced and repaired — scheduled, carried out, and closed — with the asset taken off the available list while it's in the workshop. A maintenance record is one of four kinds — service, repair, inspection or calibration — with a scheduled date, a cost, an optional supplier and any downtime.

The equipment dashboard shows a live count of overdue maintenance — scheduled work whose date has passed — so servicing never quietly slips.

---

When the firm rents a machine from a supplier for a job, that charge is a real project cost and a real payable. ConstruC books it through the same disciplined path as a subcontractor invoice.

1. Raise (draft) — record the charge. Nothing hits the books yet.
2. Approve — the cost is recognised: an actual cost on the project and a payable to the supplier in the general ledger.
3. Pay — the supplier is settled: cash goes out, the payable clears, and any withholding tax is held aside for the authority.

FIG 9.1 — hire-in money: approving books the cost and the payable; paying settles the supplier and sets aside withholding tax.

A control worth knowing — separation of duties. The person who raises a hire charge can't also approve it or pay it. Recognising the cost and releasing the cash each need a second person — the standard maker-and-checker control that stops one individual from creating and settling a payment alone.

---

Spare capacity is money. ConstruC lets you rent owned plant out — to an outside customer as a real invoice, or to another of your projects as an internal cross-charge — and books the money correctly for each.

• External customer — a real invoice. Billing raises a receivable and recognises hire income, with VAT and levies added; recording the receipt clears the receivable when the customer pays.
• Internal project — a cross-charge, no cash and no tax. The hiring project bears an equipment cost; the offset sits in an internal clearing account, so no fake outside creditor is ever created.

FIG 10.1 — hire-out money: an external hire is a taxed invoice settled by receipt; an internal hire is a clean cross-charge with no outside creditor.

Creating a hire-out marks the machine on hire and stamps its location, so the tracking board shows who has it. When it comes back, marking it returned frees it to the yard.

Why the internal clearing account matters. An internal hire isn't owed to anyone outside the firm, so booking it to ordinary Accounts Payable would invent a creditor that never gets paid and quietly inflate what the firm appears to owe. ConstruC routes it to a dedicated Internal Plant Hire Clearing account instead, keeping the real creditors ledger clean. The same treatment applies to owned-plant usage that's charged to a project.

Who can hire plant. Because a hire-out moves money — and its income or cost can land on another project's books — it's restricted to the plant and finance teams (and firm-wide oversight). A lead from an unrelated department can't create or bill one.

---

For every owned machine, ConstruC nets its income (everything it earned on hire, external and internal) against its running cost — hire-in charges, maintenance, and straight-line depreciation to today — to give a profit, a margin, and a return on the machine's purchase cost. It splits external from internal income, so you can see real cash earned separately from cross-charges.

FIG 11.1 — the fleet P&L: income minus running cost, per machine, giving profit, margin and return on the asset.

Finance-only, like all the money. The fleet P&L is gated to Finance — a department that isn't finance is refused, exactly as it is for the project cost ledger. It's a reporting view of real ledger figures, so it always reconciles with the books.

One thing that's still a report, not a posting. Depreciation currently appears in the fleet P&L as an analytical figure — it is not yet posted to the general ledger as a periodic charge. It's honest for management decisions today; posting depreciation to the books is a planned finance addition.

---

Work packages and their owners, shared with the other departments. One owner per package, and task completion rolls up into the package's progress with a manual override where the roll-up does not reflect reality.

Plant uses it to see who owns the package a machine is booked against, so a breakdown or a clash is raised with the person responsible for that work rather than announced to the whole project.

---

Plant is money on wheels, so the module is built to keep it honest.

• No double-counted cost — hired plant can't have usage posted on top of its supplier invoice; a usage post is idempotent, so it can never write the same cost twice.
• Separation of duties — the raiser of a hire-in charge can't approve or pay it.
• Money is finance-scoped — hiring plant in or out is limited to the plant and finance teams, so an unrelated lead can't post plant payables or move income onto a project.
• Clean creditors ledger — internal cross-charges and owned-plant usage credit an internal clearing account, never inventing a fake outside supplier balance.
• One firm, never another — every record is scoped to your company; one firm's data — even an offline entry re-sent — can never touch or suppress another's.
• Physically consistent — a machine can't be booked and hired out for the same dates, and the tracking board always reflects who really holds it.

---

Working offline. Usage logging is built offline-first. On a machine with no signal, an entry is saved on the device with a unique stamp; when you reconnect it syncs automatically. Re-sending the same entry is harmless — it is never duplicated, and it never collides with another firm's data.

FIG 13.1 — offline-first usage: record hours without signal, sync cleanly and safely on reconnect.

---

---

CONSTRUC · FIRM OPERATING SYSTEM · EQUIPMENT AND PLANT EDITION