The project runs three years. The question of whether it pays comes every month.

The project is the bracket

A building project is not one order but a sequence of orders over years. In Jobtura a project therefore holds several jobs together and brings costs, revenue and dates together across them.

This is where the digital building file is created. Client, contacts and your own team hang on the project. Documents, images, notes and voice recordings from the site visit stay there, even when the colleague who held the conversation moves on. Plans, drawings and the state of discussions grow along with the project.

Dates and follow-ups with a due-date overview record what is coming up when. Whatever slips shows in the overview rather than in a call from the client.

Who sees which figures is governed by permissions down to field level through release groups. A project member does not need the same view as management.

Services, hours and billing

Below the project the work is split by discipline. Structural engineering, architecture, site management or project control run as their own orders, each with its own line items and its own budget.

A service is a line item type of its own and is valued by time or as a flat rate. Services can equally be structured and billed under the German HOAI fee scale and the agreed service phases, while additional work is added by actual effort. Different fee models may therefore exist side by side within the same building project.

Time is recorded or taken over from planned assignments. The hourly rate sits on the customer or on the project, so that the same hour is valued correctly per order without anyone recalculating before the invoice.

The section that is finished is what gets invoiced. Down payments, instalments and partial invoices allow ongoing billing before the closing invoice comes at the end. That way not only the building project grows step by step, but the work delivered grows into revenue.

Purchasing and the figure beneath it

A main contractor sells the client a roof truss, a technical installation or other bought-in work, and a subcontractor carries it out. Both sides run on the same file: the work is sold to the client and ordered from the executing company at the same time. Order confirmation, documents and later the incoming invoice stay assigned to the project.

That puts what you bought in right next to what you sold. Sales prices, purchase prices and the hourly costs of your own people sit in the same place.

From that a picture emerges during the term rather than in hindsight: budget per section, booked hours, costs and contribution margin. The initial costing gradually becomes the final costing. A section may run worse than planned, as long as you notice before the next one is costed.

And if somebody asks years later, the file is still there. Service, executing partner and the related documents are connected, because they were from the start.