Projects for contractors and fit-out firms: budget, team hours and costs in one place

Say a fit-out firm in Al Quoz has three jobs running: a café in Jumeirah Lake Towers, a clinic reception in Al Barsha and the shelving of a pharmacy. The contracts sit in an e-mail, the budget in a spreadsheet, the hours on paper sheets the foreman brings back on Thursday, and the receipts for paint and screws in an envelope. Whether the café made money is known a month after the handover, if at all.

Who it is for

Projects is for businesses whose work is a long job for one customer: contractors, fit-out and maintenance firms, agencies, workshops with long jobs, event companies and printing houses. Weeks or months of work, a contract value, a team that spends time on it, materials and bills that cost money, and several invoices along the way.

A project, from the contract down

A project gets a number like PRJ-000123 and carries the customer, the site, a project manager, a start and a due date, the contract value and a budget split into phases. Each phase has its own budget, its dates and a milestone amount: demolition, joinery, electrical, finishing. Drawings and photos can be attached to the project.

Tasks and the board

The work is split into tasks: who it is assigned to, a due date, an estimate in hours, a checklist to tick and comments for the questions that would otherwise go to WhatsApp. The board shows four columns, To do, Doing, Review and Done, and a task moves from one to the next with a button (no dragging). Each person moves and ticks their own tasks.

The team's hours, from the phone

On site, nobody opens a laptop. On the phone page each person types their hours on a project or a task (1.5 or 1:30), billable or not, or taps Clock in when they start and Clock out when they leave. One running clock per person, so nobody is on two jobs at once.

Each entry keeps its hourly cost from the moment it is recorded: the person's pay in HR when HR is on, else the salary on their staff record, else a rate you type for that person in Settings → Projects.

Every week the manager opens the timesheet: each person's hours, how many are billable and what is waiting. Approve the week locks them; Send back returns them with a note, the person corrects them and they wait again. Nobody approves their own hours (the owner may).

Costs from where they happen

• Expenses: an expense on the Expenses page can name the project, so the AED 180 of paint bought on the way is a cost of the café, not of the shop.
• Materials from stock: take boards or cable for a project and the branch's stock goes down at once, at the product's cost; when there is not enough, it is refused.
• Supplier bills, subcontractors and other costs are typed on the project; a Procurement supplier invoice can be picked by its number.

Each cost line can be marked billable, with a markup, for jobs invoiced by time and materials.

Who sees the money

Three rights in Team → Rights: see projects and their figures, create and change projects, and approve the team's time. A carpenter or an electrician without the first right sees only their own tasks, their own hours and the projects they work on, never the contract value or the margin.

Not the same as job orders

CreekPOS also has job orders: a laundry bag, a phone to repair, an abaya to alter, taken at the counter with a deposit, ready in days and collected as one ordinary sale at the till. A project has no till sale: it has a budget and phases, the team's hours, costs from several places, and it is billed by milestone, by progress or by time and materials, with retention and advances. A shop may use both: a printing house takes business cards as job orders and the signage of a new mall as a project.

How the invoices go out, and what the margin looks like, is in billing a project: milestones, progress and retention.

None of this is AI: the hours, the costs and the figures are exact records.

Projects is off until a manager switches it on in Settings → Projects or Settings → Modules, and it needs Customers. It is included in Online Restaurant and Chain, and an add-on for Online Retail at AED 49 a month before VAT, bought in Billing → Plan → "Add-on modules". It is in every 14-day trial. Read the ERP page and the manual chapter.