Xero integrated construction project management software

The Client

Upside Business group is a well-reputed Australian accounting and technology consulting company expertise in Xero bookkeeping, management reporting & advisory, payroll and compliance services. They offer a range of services to help streamline business processes. The client is working with multiple construction companies for their bookkeeping, Management reporting & Advisory.

The Challenge

The client found that existing software for the construction industry only focuses on one aspect of construction management among planning, resourcing, project management and financial and management reporting. There is some software which does all but they are very expensive. So the client wanted to build a solution for construction consultancy companies which is one integrated software that does the planning, resourcing, project management, and integrated financial reporting. Majority of small and medium business in Australia uses Xero as their accounting software.

A key challenge is to keep all movement of resourcing, material, and documents in one place and also keep the accounting software Xero updated with the latest changes. So that P&L and BS are affected in real-time.

Project Scope

Business Analysis
Serverless architecture development
Web Application Development (Frontend + Backend)
Mobile Application Development (Android + iOS)
Excel AddOn Development
Worker role development for background synchronization
QA & Testing
Support & Maintenance

The Solution

Our team understood construction consultancy business workflow, processes, expectations. We suggested the client a cloud-based serverless and scalable and multi-tenant solutions. Check the architecture diagram of the solutions below.

Architecture diagram

With the help of our team client was able to achieve his following goals for the software products.

Management of all construction-related documents like architecture drawings, structural engineering, contracts, landscape drawing, schedules, defect management, project site photos in online collaborative folders specific to the project.
Ability to Archive project and documents.
Ability to create tasks and assign them to supervisors, engineers.
Work in progress PDF report with forecasted vs actual cost
Project resource allocation and scheduling worker’s job in an online Gantt chart format. And review it periodically.
Track and verify progress against defined progress claim schedule.
Ability to report over budget or under budget expenses by category to do better management
Ability to manage supplier expenses and labor timesheets in a pre-mapped cost center for a given project. This will be automatically added to xero.com under the pre-mapped project tracking category and cost center tracking category.
Ability to raise invoices according to the progress claim schedule. This will be automatically added to xero.com under the pre-mapped project tracking category and cost center tracking category
Labors and supervisors are able to report timesheet using android and ios apps. They are also able to report the progress of construction by taking photos.
A manager is able to approve timesheets of labors and supervisors.
Ability to manage work orders.
Ability to reconcile project costs. Which will sync with Xero.
Super admin view for accessing other companies’ data
Excel AddOn helps the client to make customized reports (which are not available in Xero) for a company and share it with them. And addon will keep updating data automatically when next time excel is open or data is refreshed manually. So the client doesn’t need to manually export data out of Xero and copy-paste all the sales, purchase data in excel.

We have delivered this solution in multiple phases. it took us 14 months to deliver the complete solution. From 6th month onwards client started using it on live. we are still working with a client on a new set of enhancements.

Engagement Model

Time and Material

Platform/Technology

Microsoft Asp.net Core MVC and API v 2.1
Frontend: Angular 7, jQuery, Other third party components
HTML/CSS: HTML5, CSS3, SCSS
Azure scalable cloud service, blog storage, worker role
Programming language: C#

Results

Construction Projects worth 10 Million a lready completed.
30% Reduction in hosting cost(per month) by scheduled usage of cloud resources.
Huge time saved in preparing management reporting for work in progress project.
Operational efficiency increased resulted in an average of 30% of construction projects get completed at a lower cost than budgeted.
Fully Automated Integration with #2nd most popular Cloud Accounting Software Xero.com.
It made them easily fathom profitability
Increased transparency and trust between management and onsite worker by using a mobile app
Increased productivity per month per employee.