Finance handbook

Finance answers four questions, every day, for every project:

• Who do we have to pay, and when? Workers, suppliers, subcontractors, the tax authority.
• Who owes us, and are they late? Certified work, retention held back, approved claims.
• Is this job making money? Value earned against cost incurred, today and at completion.
• Will we run out of cash before it does? The forward bank position, and the worst month.

Because ConstruC is department-first, Finance sees the whole money picture across every project while Site sees works, Procurement sees orders and QS sees measurement. Finance does not re-enter their data. It receives it.

The one idea to hold onto. Money is recorded once, where it happens. A delivery received on site, an hour worked, a certificate signed — each writes a single entry to a shared ledger, and every finance screen is a different view of that one ledger. If two screens ever disagree, one of them is a bug, not a difference of opinion.

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Money moves through a project in a loop, and Finance sits at both ends of it.

1. The contract sets the rules — what type of deal, what it is worth, how much retention is held, what caps apply.
2. The budget commits it — the contract value is broken into cost codes with budgets.
3. Work is ordered and done — Procurement raises orders, Site records labour and deliveries, plant runs hours.
4. Cost lands in the ledger — each of those writes a cost entry against a cost code, automatically.
5. Work is measured — QS records progress against the bill, which turns cost into earned value.
6. The client is billed — a payment certificate claims the work done, less retention, plus tax.
7. Money comes in and goes out — the certificate is paid; suppliers, subcontractors and workers are paid.
8. The position is read — profit, cash, exposure and forecast, all derived from the entries above.

FIG 2.1 — the money loop. Finance owns the first two steps and the last two; the middle four happen in other departments and arrive here as entries.

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This is the map worth memorising. Every arrow is a real, automatic link in the platform — not a process someone has to remember to follow.

FIG 3.1 — the finance link map. Cost flows in from four departments; the programme supplies the plan to compare against; budgets and payment status flow back out.

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The Financial dashboard is the one screen that answers "how is this job doing". It is built in bands, deliberately ordered.

Band 1 — obligations, first

This band is first because it is the only part of the screen you can act on today.

• We owe — workers unpaid, subcontractor invoices awaiting payment, and PAYE, SSNIT and withholding tax accrued but not yet remitted. The three add up to due now.
• On order, not yet delivered — open purchase orders. Shown separately and deliberately kept out of "due now": an order is not a debt until something arrives.
• Owed to us — client invoices outstanding, retention the client is holding, and compensation from approved time claims.
• Work done, not yet billed — completed work nobody has been asked to pay for yet. This is the cue to raise a certificate. It is not a receivable, so it stays out of "owed to us".

Band 2 — is it making money, will it stay solvent

Band 3 — the position today

Band 4 — exposure

Committed but not spent; burn rate over the last 7 and 30 days; contingency remaining; and work in progress. Below it, the top at-risk cost codes — the codes whose forecast has passed their revised budget.

A note on "budget variance". It compares the budget to the forecast, not to what has been spent so far. Spend-to-date is always below the final cost on a live job, so a variance built on it would say "under budget" on every project until the day it finished.

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Everything else in Finance obeys this screen. Each project holds its own contract; a firm can run a lump sum on one job and cost-plus on the next with no interference between them.

Six types are supported, and the type changes what the form asks for and what the platform enforces:

The contract also sets the retention percentage and the limit of retention — the point at which withholding stops.

FIG 5.1 — the contract type decides both how a period is valued and how much may ever be certified.

The ceiling binds on the cumulative total, not on one certificate. Checking each certificate alone would let any number of them sit under the cap and blow through it together. When a certificate would breach the ceiling it is refused, not quietly reduced — quietly certifying less than was entered changes the client's bill without telling anyone. The remedy is a variation that raises the ceiling.

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A payment application is how the firm asks to be paid.

1. Raise it — enter the period and the work done. On cost-driven contracts the screen offers a value derived from recorded cost with the fee applied; you can accept it or type your own. It is offered, never applied: the certificate is a professional judgement.
2. Retention is withheld — the contract percentage, stopping at the limit of retention.
3. Tax is added — on the full certified work, not on work less retention. Retention defers payment; it does not reduce the value of the supply.
4. Submit, then certify — certifying is the moment revenue is recognised, and it writes to the ledger.
5. Record payment — cash in, receivable cleared.
6. Release retention — when it falls due, retention moves from held to ordinary receivable and is collected like any invoice.

FIG 6.1 — a certificate's life. Two gates stand in the way: the contract ceiling, and the rule that the person who raised it cannot certify it.

The arithmetic on every certificate:

net due  =  work certified  −  retention  +  tax

For Ghana, tax is the levies first, then VAT on top of the levy-inclusive amount:

On 100,000 of certified work that is 6,000 of levies and 15,900 of VAT — 21,900 in total.

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Supplier and subcontractor invoices arrive against orders and subcontracts. Each carries its own retention (retainage) and withholding tax, and each moves through approval before it becomes payable. What Finance sees on the dashboard as "subcontractor invoices" is the total of everything approved or submitted and not yet paid.

Subcontracts hold a schedule of values, so a subcontractor's application is measured against agreed line items rather than a single number.

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A change order is the only way the contract value moves. It is raised, approved, and then applied — and applying it does two things at once: it increases or decreases the project's contract value, and it adjusts the affected budget lines. Until it is applied it affects nothing.

That is why the dashboard's contract value can differ from the figure on the contract screen: the contract screen holds the original deal, the dashboard shows the deal plus every applied change.

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The Budget screen holds cost codes with an original and a revised budget, and optionally a cost-to-complete. The Cost tower is the control view over it: budget against committed against actual against forecast, per code, with the codes most at risk surfaced first.

Three numbers people confuse:

• Committed — ordered, not yet delivered. A future obligation.
• Actual — delivered or done, and in the ledger. A real cost.
• Forecast at completion — what the code will finally cost.

FIG 9.1 — an order becomes a commitment, a delivery turns it into actual cost, and only an entered cost-to-complete turns the total into a forecast.

Where a cost code has a cost-to-complete entered, the forecast is actual plus that figure. Where it does not, the platform falls back to the larger of committed and actual — which is a floor, not a forecast, because it assumes the rest of that work is free. Entering cost-to-complete on live codes is what turns the cost tower from a record into a forecast.

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Expenses are site and office costs that are not orders — fuel, permits, small tools. They post to a cost code and become actual cost on approval.

Payroll runs Ghana statutory deductions:

Net pay is gross less employee SSNIT less PAYE. Employer cost is gross plus employer SSNIT. Both PAYE and SSNIT accrue as liabilities until they are remitted, which is why they appear under "we owe" on the dashboard.

Allowances are sums held inside the contract for work not yet specified. Drawing against an allowance records what it was spent on, so the unspent balance is always visible.

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When a subcontractor's fault costs the firm money — rectification, cleaning, plant standing — a back-charge records it against them and recovers it from what they are owed. The screen tracks raised, agreed and recovered, so nothing is written off by forgetting about it.

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Every money event writes a balanced journal to a real chart of accounts. Nothing on any finance screen is typed twice; the screens are views over these entries.

The accounts you will meet most:

FIG 12.1 — certifying recognises revenue and creates the receivable; payment converts the receivable to cash. Retention sits in its own account until released.

The Ledger (P&L) screen reads these entries into a profit and loss and a trial balance. Because it is derived rather than typed, it cannot drift from the transactions that produced it.

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Earned value is the industry method for asking whether a job is performing, and it needs three numbers:

• Planned value — what the programme said would be done by now.
• Earned value — what has actually been done, priced at budget.
• Actual cost — what it cost to do it.

From those come two indices and a forecast:

Cashflow shows money in against money out over the remaining months, with payment lags applied, producing the running bank position. The number that matters is the worst month — the peak funding requirement. Forecast offers the three standard forecasting methods so you can see how sensitive the outcome is to the assumption you pick.

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This is the most important section in this handbook, and it is what separates ConstruC from a spreadsheet.

Some figures are only meaningful if the data behind them supports them. Rather than print a confident number regardless, the platform withholds the verdict and tells you why. A blank with a reason is more useful than a number with none.

You will see this in three places.

Forecast at completion. A forecast needs measured progress, because it extends the cost performance you are actually achieving. Where nothing has been measured, the screen shows spend against budget and says "no forecast yet" rather than dressing spend-to-date as a projection.

Schedule performance. SPI divides earned value by planned value, so it is only as good as the programme. The index is withheld unless all three hold:

1. The current baseline covers at least 80% of the programme's activities.
2. The programme's own reported completion is not wildly behind what has been measured.
3. Activities showing progress carry actual start dates — a percentage says how far along a task is, but only a date tells the programme where it sits in time.

Cost performance is never withheld alongside it, because CPI compares two recorded facts and does not depend on the programme at all.

Progress curves. The planned line runs to the end of the job; the actual line stops at today. Carrying actuals forward past today would draw a measurement for months that have not happened.

FIG 14.1 — the rule applied throughout Finance: state the position always, claim a verdict only when the data supports one, and name the remedy when it does not.

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Separation of duties. The person who raises something cannot be the person who approves it — not by convention, but by the platform refusing. It is enforced on:

• client payment certificates (the act that recognises revenue)
• supplier and subcontractor invoices
• subcontracts, and their retainage releases
• change orders
• expenses
• purchase orders

Retention release has no separate requester to divide from; its control is the cap — you cannot release more than is actually held.

Ceilings and caps. Retention stops at the limit of retention. Certification stops at the contract ceiling. Neither can be exceeded by entering a larger number.

Idempotency. Every ledger post carries a key, so the same event cannot be booked twice — a re-submitted certificate or a re-synced site entry corrects rather than duplicates.

Roles. A finance LEAD manages the department across every project in the firm. A finance MEMBER works within it. Company roles above department level — CEO and Manager — see across all departments; a lead in another department sees none of Finance.

Your company's data is yours alone. Every record carries the company that owns it, and every query is scoped by it. A finance lead in one company asking for another company's project — by direct link, by guessing an address — is refused, whether they are reading or writing. This is enforced at the data layer, below the screens, so it holds for every route including ones added later.

FIG 15.1 — which company you belong to comes from your session, never from anything the request can set. That single rule is what keeps two firms on the same platform apart.

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The daily loop

1. Open the Dashboard and read the obligations band — who must be paid today, who is late.
2. Check work done, not yet billed. If it is material, raise a certificate.
3. Look at the at-risk cost codes on the cost tower. Enter cost-to-complete on anything live.
4. Approve what is waiting — invoices, expenses, change orders — and refuse what breaches a ceiling.
5. Once a month, read Earned value and Cashflow together: one says whether the job performs, the other whether it survives.

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This handbook describes the Finance department as built. Where a screen withholds a number, that is deliberate and the screen will say what is missing.