The best software for a husband-and-wife building business
is the one you both use.

In a lot of small building businesses run by a couple, the work splits along a line nobody drew on purpose. He prices the jobs, runs the site and deals with the trades. You do the rest: the contracts, the progress claims, the supplier invoices, the BAS, and the phone call from the client who wants to know why the kitchen is late.

Both jobs are hard. Only one of them sees the numbers, and it sees them last.

Why the numbers arrive late

A job’s real cost arrives in pieces. The estimate was done weeks or months ago, in whatever he priced it in. Orders go out by phone or text. Invoices turn up after the work is done, sometimes after the stage has already been claimed. By the time every invoice is in and coded, the job is often finished, and the first honest answer to “did that one make money?” comes from the accountant.

The bank balance does not help. It tells you what cash is in the account, not which job earned it, and a deposit on the next job can cover a loss on the last one for months.

So the office ends up doing two things at once: keeping the business running, and rebuilding what each job actually cost, by hand, at night.

Look at where the pain of a system that does not work actually lands. Typing the same invoice into two places, chasing a claim that should have gone out last week, and working out a job’s margin from a spreadsheet are office problems. On site they show up as a question, “are we alright on that job?”, rather than as three hours on a Tuesday night.

So it is no surprise when the search for something better starts at the kitchen table rather than on site, and when the partner who feels the problem every week is the one who ends up making the call.

It also means the software has two different jobs to do, for two different people, and a switch often goes wrong when one of them is forgotten.

This is the part that decides whether a switch sticks. Nearly everything you want from a system, you get from information he creates.

• You can only see whether a job is on budget if the budget exists, which means his estimate has to become the job budget instead of staying in his spreadsheet.
• You can only see what is committed if orders are raised in the system, which means they have to be raised there instead of by text.
• You can only claim on time if you know a stage is done, which means the schedule has to be kept current.

If the estimating is slower than the spreadsheet he already knows, or the schedule is more trouble than the whiteboard, he will keep using the old tools. Nobody announces it. The new system just goes quiet, and you are back to rebuilding the numbers by hand, with one more subscription.

So the test for a partnership is not whether the software does what you need. It is whether it does what you need without making his job worse.

What the office needs

• A cost position on every live job that you can open today: the budget, what is committed in orders, and what has been invoiced, without waiting for month end.
• Supplier invoices entered once and checked against the order they belong to, not typed into one system and again into another.
• Progress claims raised from the stage the job has actually reached, so they go out when the work is done rather than when someone remembers.
• Your accounts left where they are. If the business runs on Xero, the new system should connect to it, not replace it.

What the site needs

• Estimating that is quicker than the spreadsheet he uses now, built on his own rates.
• An estimate that becomes the job budget and the purchase orders, so nothing is priced twice.
• A schedule that is easy to keep current, where moving one task moves the tasks that depend on it.
• Something he can check from site without going back to the office to do it.

If a product only answers one of these lists, it will not fix the problem in the first section, because the office list depends on the site list being done. The guide to choosing construction software covers the wider criteria, and the site half of the list is set out from his side in builder software.