A contractor's books run on certificates and retentions, not simple invoices. Here's how Mwamba Civil & Building Contractors — one of our eighteen industry reference companies — carries that onto CloudERP, now fully onboarded and transacting.
Most businesses invoice for what they've delivered. A contractor invoices for what's been certified — and the gap between the two is where a lot of construction bookkeeping goes wrong. Mwamba Civil & Building Contractors Ltd, one of our eighteen fictional reference companies, is built to show exactly how that gap gets handled.
Where the complexity actually is
Mwamba's debtors aren't simple invoices — they're six interim payment certificates, each one a client's confirmed sign-off on work done so far. Sitting alongside them: the 5% retention clients hold back until final completion, and the retention Mwamba itself holds back from its subcontractors, each on its own line rather than buried inside a debtor or creditor balance. Work that's been done but not yet certified — uncertified contract WIP — carries its own estimate, clearly marked as an estimate rather than a confirmed figure. A mobilisation advance from a client, and a defects provision for work still under warranty, round out the picture. Even the asset register has its own wrinkle: an imported asphalt paver priced in US dollars, ticking against the exchange rate on the day it was brought onto the books.
Fully onboarded, and transacting
Mwamba isn't a static example — it went through the same review and sign-off workflow described in our opening balances post, and it's since carried on: a real quotation, sales order, invoice and payment on the selling side; a real purchase order, supplier bill and payment on the buying side; and — because a good part of what it owes is priced in US dollars — a month-end exchange rate revaluation on those foreign-currency balances too. What you'd see visiting Mwamba today is a contractor mid-project, not a blank onboarding shell.
Get in touch if construction accounting like this is closer to your own business than a standard trading company.
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