One record for the site and the sales desk

The situation

Sri Mireya Builders & Developers is a development company working out of Genguvarpatti, in the Theni district of Tamil Nadu. Like most builder-developers, it is two businesses wearing one name: a construction operation that has to be supplied and staffed, and a sales operation that has to answer buyers.

Those two halves usually keep separate records. Site progress lives in a supervisor's notebook, material in delivery challans, and bookings and payment schedules in whatever the sales desk keeps. Each is fine on its own. The problem is the question that crosses between them — what a unit has cost so far against what has been collected on it — because answering it means assembling three records that were never designed to meet.

How they run it

• Site progress is recorded on the day it happens, against the project it belongs to, rather than written up later from memory.
• Material is booked against the project it was delivered to, so consumption is tied to a location instead of sitting in a pile of challans.
• Payments in and dues outstanding are held against the same project record the construction side is writing to.
• Enquiries and bookings carry a stage, so the sales desk works from a list rather than from recall.

What that gives them

Both halves of the business write to the same record. What was done on site and what is owed on a unit are answerable from one place, on the day, rather than reconstructed at the end of a month from three sets of paper.