Build Cash Ledger
Cash flow, purchase orders and payment deadlines for contractors and developers, commercial or residential. BCL watches the dates that cost you money, so that remembering them stops being somebody's job.
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Elmfield Phase 2
Budget 1.42m · Committed 890k
| Cost line | Oct | Nov | Dec | Jan |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 02 Groundworks | 48,200 | 61,400 | 22,000 | · |
| 02 Frame and envelope | · | 18,750 | 94,300 | 88,100 |
| 05 M and E package | · | · | 12,400 | 55,900 |
| 01 Client receipts | (96,000) | · | (192,000) | · |
Illustrative figures. Costs positive, receipts in brackets.
A spreadsheet is a perfectly good forecast. It stops being enough the moment the forecast has to answer for itself.
01
Orders sit underneath the cost lines they belong to, so what you have promised a supplier is worked out rather than typed. Budget is the plan. Forecast is what the months currently add up to. Committed is the part you cannot take back, and it is the only one of the three a spreadsheet cannot tell you.
02
An application for payment starts a chain of deadlines set by the Construction Act. Let them pass without serving a notice and the sum applied for becomes payable in full, whatever anybody thinks the work was worth. BCL knows the dates, and puts the cost of the silence on your dashboard the day it happens.
03
Add the whole business together without copying figures between files, coded so you can see what went on land, or on main contract works, across every site at once. Then put the bids you are out on next to it and see what next year looks like if they land.
The bit that costs real money
Miss the notices and the sum applied for becomes payable in full, whatever the work was worth. Not a penalty somebody chooses to apply. It is what the Act says happens.
Day 0
Application
The subcontractor applies for payment
+7 days
Payment due
The due date the contract sets
+5 days
Payment notice
Say what you consider due, or the application stands
7 days before
Pay-less notice
The last chance to say a lower figure
+17 days
Final date
It has to be paid
BCL stores the four dates against each application when it is logged, rather than working them out fresh each time, so a contract term edited in March cannot quietly move a deadline that passed in February. Intervals come from your contract, and fall back to the Scheme where it is silent.
What it will not do is write the notice for you. A payment or pay-less notice has to state the sum considered due and the basis on which it is calculated, and a half-right generated one creates the liability instead of avoiding it. The dates are ours. The wording stays with your surveyor.
Cost and revenue lines against months, in a grid that behaves like a spreadsheet. Click a cell and type. Spread a total across its months in one of four shapes, then override a single month without breaking the rest. Per site, or every site added together.
Purchase orders that number themselves, against a supplier register you control. Approvals, variations, a printable order document, goods received, and invoices matched against what actually turned up.
What you hold from subcontractors and what your clients hold from you, split into its two release tranches, aged by how long it has been sitting there. Retention goes missing because it was forgotten, not because it was worked out wrongly.
Every application for payment with the Construction Act dates that follow from it, what was served and when, and the sum that becomes payable if the deadlines pass in silence.
What you are tendering for, spread across the months it would run, weighted by the chance of winning or shown at full value. Then how often the bidding actually lands, by count and by value.
Plots or commercial phases, build stages with forecast and actual dates, sale prices, and columns you define yourself. Slippage shows up as a status rather than as a conversation somebody has to start.
Everything below is built and working today, not planned. It is the list a procurement questionnaire asks for, answered before anybody has to send one.
BCL is being built alongside people who run sites, and everything described on this page works. It is still young, which is worth knowing for one good reason: if there is something it does not do yet, this is the point where saying so changes what gets built.
Been sent an invite link? Open it and it will do the rest.