Construction & infrastructure · Chennai, India
Cutting RA bill certification from four days to under an hour
Client: An infrastructure contractor operating across South India
Product deployed: ConstrakERP360
Summary
An infrastructure contractor running several concurrent sites was losing days per subcontractor to running account bill disputes. Moving measurement submission into a partner portal, with retention and advance recovery calculated automatically, reduced certification from around four days to under an hour.
Measured results
- 4 days → <1 hr
- RA bill certification time
- At indent
- BOQ overruns now flagged
- Per project
- equipment cost allocation
- Live
- project profitability visibility
The challenge
The contractor ran several concurrent sites with a large subcontractor base. Each running account bill arrived as a paper measurement sheet, was re-keyed by a site clerk, checked against a spreadsheet of previously certified quantities, and then argued over.
The arguments were rarely about whether work had been done. They were about carry-forward quantities, retention percentages and advance recovery schedules — arithmetic that both sides were doing separately and getting differently.
Separately, BOQ overruns were surfacing only when invoices were booked, weeks after the material had already been consumed on site.
What we built
ConstrakERP360 was deployed with the BOQ imported per project and budgeted cost set against each line. Site indents were moved into the system, with a budget check at the point of raising: a request that would push a BOQ line past its budgeted quantity is flagged immediately rather than discovered at invoice booking.
The partner self-service portal was opened to subcontractors, who now submit measurements directly. Retention at the contracted percentage, mobilisation advance recovery on the agreed schedule, previously certified carry-forward and TDS are all computed by the system from the contract terms.
Equipment cost — owned and hired plant, running hours, fuel and maintenance — was allocated to the project that used the machine rather than absorbed into overheads, which changed several project margins materially once visible.
Site attendance moved to digital muster feeding wage computation for daily and piece-rate labour.
Our RA bill certification used to take four days of back-and-forth with each subcontractor. It now takes about an hour. The retention and advance recovery calculate themselves, so there is nothing left to dispute.