Managing director Monday morning
Five jobs, what each is worth and what each is forecast to make, the cash position for six weeks, and every Construction Act date falling in the next fortnight. One screen, before the first phone call.
Murgese Construction
One program instead of three
The project system, the commercial package and the accounts are one program sharing the same jobs, on the firm’s own office PC.
In final testing
Below: the portfolio screen, on the sample company the program builds for anyone to look round. Every figure in it is invented.
What a contractor runs today
Three systems, and the typing in between
Most firms this size pay for three. Each one is good at its own part of the job and knows nothing about the other two, so the same figure is entered two or three times and the month end is spent making them agree.
- 01 A project system The diary, the drawings, the snags, the RFIs and the safety file.
- 02 A commercial package The applications, the subcontract accounts, the variations and the CVR.
- 03 An accounts package The sales and purchase ledgers, the bank, VAT and CIS.
Murgese Construction is the three of them as one program, with the jobs shared between them. What that means in practice is easier shown than argued, so here is a month on a real one.
One month, one job
Kestrel Yard, 14 flats
A fourteen-flat scheme at £2.52m for a developer, on JCT Design and Build with the domestic reverse charge, in its twenty-second week. Every screen below is the running program and every figure is the one on it. The firm, its jobs and its people are invented; the arithmetic is not.
01 On site, first thing
The diary goes in on the phone, a tap at a time
Seven on site at Kestrel Yard. The weather went in at 08:40 with the name of whoever wrote it, and the rest of the day goes in the same way: a photograph, labour, plant, deliveries, visitors and delays, each one a button. It waits on the phone until the phone can reach the office PC, and this morning it has all gone.
Nobody photographs a page of a day book and emails it to the office to be typed up on Friday.
02 It reaches the office
On the job, against the money, and nobody typed it again
It arrives on Kestrel Yard itself, photographs and all, with the name of the man who wrote it on it. Nobody in the office moved it there. The same screen carries the revised contract sum, the value and cost to date, the margin, the cash received, the retention held, and the dates that are waiting on somebody.
The diary and the money are one record. There is no join between a project system and a commercial one, because there is one system.
03 The subcontractor applies
It lands on the order he signed, and is checked against it
Brennan Roofing’s application for the roof arrives by email on 4 October and lands on their order. Three things are flagged before anybody opens it. These are the first bank details seen for them, so payment is stopped until somebody rings them on the number already held. Their employer’s liability insurance ran out on 26 September. And it is a revised application, replacing one that was never answered.
The order, the claim and the assessment are the same record. Nobody types it again from a spreadsheet of subcontract accounts.
04 The notice goes out
Inside the Act's dates, counted from his application
The clock on the screen is the contract's own, counted from the day his application was received, not from the day somebody got to it. The notice is fixed when it is issued and emailed from the program. Every date the firm owes, and every date it is owed, is on one screen with whose move it is next.
The bill follows from the same assessed figures, with CIS on the labour and the reverse charge accounted. It is not typed into an accounts package afterwards. This is the accounts package.
05 The month end
The reconciliation is already written
September on Kestrel Yard: £897,800 of value to date, and the job forecast to finish £201,100 up, 9.3% of its final value of £2,158,100, with no foreseeable loss. The cost side is the ledger rather than a spreadsheet: bills, supplier invoices and plant hire were coded to their cost codes on the way through. Signing the month off posts the month's journal and freezes the figures.
Nobody rebuilt the CVR in Excel. There was nothing to reconcile, because there is one set of books.
06 The money arrives
And the week reads off one screen
Back where it started: five jobs, what each is worth and what each is forecast to make, the cash position for the next six weeks, and the next fourteen days of Construction Act dates across all of them. That is the screen a managing director opens on a Monday.
Nothing on it was assembled for the purpose. It is the same records the month was run on.
The running program on a sample company; every figure is invented.
Four people, one program
What you would open it for
The same records, read four ways. Pick a job and the card changes; nothing else on the page does.
Quantity surveyor The valuation run
Applications valued down the schedule the job was priced from, subcontractors' claims checked against their orders before they are opened, variations from request to agreed, and the reconciliation that says what the job will make.
Site manager On the slab
The diary, the drawings at the right revision, snags pinned where they are, RFIs, inspections, incidents and signed briefings. Written on the phone, with no signal, by the people it happened to.
Accounts The month end
Bills approved against orders nobody could raise without approval, CIS worked out on the labour, the VAT return prepared with the reverse charge, and the books already written when the year end comes round.
The way into the rest
Everything around the job
The job is in the middle and everything else is attached to it. Choose any of the nine to see the thing it stops going wrong, and the screen that does it.
Getting paid
The application went in late, so the money came in late. The pay less notice missed its date, so the full claim had to be paid.
Applications for payment valued line by line, the four Construction Act dates worked out for every one, notices fixed when they are issued, and retention tracked both ways.
Getting paid
Applications arrive by email. One comes from a firm with no order. Another has new bank details on it.
Each application checked against the order before anyone opens it: arithmetic, over-claims, variations not instructed, retention, insurance out of date and changed bank details, with payment stopped until someone rings.
The money on the job
Finding out at the year end that a job lost money.
Budgets by cost code and a cost value reconciliation every month: cost to date from the ledger, certified subcontract work, cost to complete, forecast final cost and margin, and early warning of a loss.
The money on the job
Orders placed that nobody approved, with a supplier nobody checked.
Purchase requisitions held against the job’s cost code budget, an approval chain by each person’s limit, an out of budget form that always goes to a director, and new suppliers held for Accounts.
The money on the job
Pricing the job in a spreadsheet, and comparing subcontractors’ prices by eye.
Estimates priced from a bill of quantities, packages sent to subcontractors to price, bids compared side by side, and the winner turned straight into an order.
The money on the job
The appraisal, the bank loan and the plot sales kept in three different spreadsheets.
A development job: plots and sales from reservation to completion, the residual appraisal with the adopted figures and now beside them, the lender’s facility with drawdowns and interest, and stock at the month end.
Running the job
The diary is written on paper on site. The office types it all in again.
Site diary, photos, drawings, snags pinned on the drawing, RFIs and the gang’s hours, written on a phone with or without a signal and sent the next time it reaches the office PC, arriving on the job rather than beside it.
Running the job
An inspection nobody did. An injury nobody reported. A permit nobody closed.
Inspections and checklists, observations, incidents with RIDDOR flagged, RAMS with site briefings signed on the phone, toolbox talks, and permits to work with a timed fire watch for hot work.
The office and your data
The books wait for the accountant at the year end, and the VAT return is a scramble every quarter.
Full double-entry accounts in the same program as the jobs: sales and purchases, bank, the VAT return prepared with the domestic reverse charge, CIS prepared, management reports, and group accounts built in on the same engine as Murgese Consolidate.
The running program on a sample company; every figure is invented.
What that is worth
Five things, as facts
- One programThe project system, the commercial package and the accounts share the same jobs. The schedule the estimator priced is the one applications are valued against; the assessment of a subcontractor’s claim is the bill that pays it; the cost on that bill is the cost on the job. There is no join between systems because there is one system, and it holds one company or several, grouped or not. Your companies.
- Built for how UK building work is doneJCT and NEC4 timetables and the Scheme, payment and pay less notices fixed when they are issued, retention both ways, CIS on the labour only, and the domestic reverse charge.
- Your own office PCThe books are in a database on the firm’s own machine, shared over the office network. No cloud account holds them. Where your records live.
- Works with no signalThe phone app writes on site whether there is a signal or not, queues what it wrote, and sends it when the phone can reach the office PC: on the office Wi-Fi, or from site through a private connection the firm has set up. It talks to that PC and to nothing else.
- AI only on your own accountOff unless the firm switches it on with its own Anthropic, OpenAI or Microsoft Azure account. Nothing passes through Murgese Ltd.
Try it on your own contract
The Construction Act clock
Four dates decide whether a payment can be argued about, and they are counted in days from the valuation date. Pick the contract, give it a date, and here they are. This is the module Murgese Construction runs on every application and every subcontractor payment, so what it says here is what the program would print.
This clock on its own page → Work out a CIS deduction → All the free tools →
Under the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 as amended, every payment has a due date and a final date for payment. The payer gives a payment notice within five days of the due date saying what is due and how it is worked out, and without one the sum applied for is the notified sum. A pay less notice has to be given no later than the period the contract states before the final date, and has to say the amount and the basis of it, and without one the notified sum is payable in full. Murgese Construction counts those four dates from the contract’s own periods and prints them on every application and every notice.
Murgese Connect
Your subcontractors apply on your order, from their phone
Each subcontractor you invite gets a login of their own: their orders with you, what you have certified and the notices you have given. They send the next application line by line, and it lands on the order with that day as the day received, so the clock above starts the day they press Send.
- Their own orders, and nothing of your program
- Signed in with a password and an authenticator app
- Through a relay at your firm’s own address, which cannot read it
On site, where there is nothing
It works with no signal, and it talks to one computer
Kestrel Yard has no signal on the slab and most sites do not have it everywhere. What is written on the phone is kept on the phone and queued. When the phone can reach the office PC, on the office Wi-Fi or from site through a private connection the firm has set up, it goes once and lands on the job with the name of whoever wrote it. The phone talks to the firm’s own office PC and to nothing else.
The running program on a sample company; every figure is invented.
Kept on the phone, sent when the office is in reach
In the film, a gang’s labour and the weather are written away from the office and shown amber as waiting. Once the phone reaches the office PC they go, once, and turn into the day’s entries with the name of whoever wrote them.
Where the app stands
In private testing, on Android. It is in neither store, so there is nothing to download yet and no badge to press. It has its own privacy notice.
Before you give anybody an email address
Have a look round it first
The program builds a sample firm with five jobs in a few minutes, on any machine, and every picture on these pages came off it. Nothing on that page asks for anything.
Not on sale yet
Register your interest
Murgese Construction is in final testing. Tell us about your firm and we will come back to you when it is on sale, with a date and a price rather than a newsletter.