ForgeSolutionz
Get in touch
ForgeSolutionz
Get in touch

Business Central for Construction

Construction businesses run on project margin, and most lose visibility of it somewhere between the estimate and the final account. Business Central gives you job costing, progress billing and retention tracking in the same system as your general ledger, so committed cost is visible while a job is still running.

Book a free consultation
Construction teams working with ForgeSolutionz

What usually goes wrong in construction

Margin only visible after completion

When costs sit in spreadsheets until a job closes, overruns are discovered when it is far too late to recover them through a variation.

Committed cost is invisible

Purchase orders raised against a job but not yet invoiced rarely appear in the cost position, so a project looks profitable right up until the invoices land.

Retention tracked manually

Retention held on both customer and subcontractor sides commonly lives in a spreadsheet, and money genuinely goes uncollected because nobody was tracking the release date.

Subcontractor compliance

Insurance expiry, tax status and certification are tracked separately from the purchasing system, so an expired certificate is caught late or not at all.

How Business Central handles it

Job costing with dimensions

Cost captured against job, phase and task using Business Central dimensions, so margin can be read by project, by contract type or by site manager without rebuilding reports each time.

Work in progress reporting

Cost to complete, percentage complete and WIP recognition calculated inside the ledger rather than in a spreadsheet reconciled once a month.

Progress and application billing

Applications for payment, certified values and variations tracked against the contract, with retention calculated and held automatically.

Purchase commitments

Purchase orders visible in the job cost position from the moment they are raised, so committed spend is part of the margin picture.

Subcontractor management

Supplier records carrying insurance and certification expiry, with blocking rules that prevent orders being raised against a lapsed subcontractor.

Plant and equipment

Fixed asset tracking with recharging to jobs, so plant costs land against the project that used them.

What changes

Live margin per job rather than a figure calculated after completion

Committed cost included in the project position

Retention released on time on both sides of the contract

One system for the ledger and the job cost report

Construction questions

Yes. The Jobs module supports job, phase and task level costing, budgets against actuals, and work in progress recognition. Combined with dimensions it gives you margin by project, contract type or site without maintaining a separate costing system.

Yes, with configuration. Retention is handled on both the customer and subcontractor side, with release dates tracked so held amounts are actually collected. Applications for payment and certified values are managed against the contract rather than in a parallel spreadsheet.

Dedicated construction packages tend to be stronger on estimating and site level detail out of the box. Business Central is stronger as a single financial system across multiple entities, and it integrates with specialist estimating tools. Businesses running several companies or reporting as a group usually benefit more from the consolidated ledger.

Every service, applied to construction

We do not only do Business Central here. Each of our six practices looks different in this sector, and this is what each one means in practice.

Consulting for construction

Discovery centres on how you actually cost a job: where estimates come from, how variations get approved and who owns the cost to complete figure. We map that before deciding what Business Central needs to look like.

Business Central Consulting

Implementation for construction

We build the job, phase and task structure around your contract types, then configure WIP recognition and retention so the ledger and the job cost report finally agree with each other.

Business Central Implementation

Integrations for construction

Estimating packages, plant hire systems, timesheet apps and subcontractor portals connected to Business Central, so site data reaches the job cost position without anyone rekeying a timesheet.

Business Central Integrations

Migration for construction

Moving off Sage or a construction specific package means deciding how much job history follows you. We migrate open contracts and retention balances in full, and archive closed jobs rather than dragging a decade of them along.

ERP Migration to Business Central

DevOps for construction

Document control, BIM collaboration and site systems tend to sprawl across servers nobody owns. We consolidate them onto Azure with proper backup and access control, and put deployments behind a pipeline.

DevOps and Cloud Engineering

AI automation for construction

Subcontractor applications for payment and supplier invoices read, matched against the order and the certified value, and escalated only where they disagree. That is usually the single largest manual load in a construction finance team.

AI Workflow Automation

Talk to someone who knows the sector

A free thirty minute call with a senior engineer. Bring the process that is costing you time and you will leave with a written summary of your options, whether or not you go on to work with ForgeSolutionz.

Schedule now