The house, the crew and the money.

A building site does not run on general-ledger vocabulary. It runs on houses, stages, gangs, claims and advances, and any system that asks a site clerk to think in journal entries will be filled in badly or not at all. Vantage Point's construction module is written in the site's own words, and does the accounting underneath without anybody on site having to know it is happening.

Estimating is the part most builders lose money on, so quantities are worked out from a rule book you define once — the build elements and mixes a house is made of — rather than from whoever is estimating this week. Buying happens against a specific house and a specific stage, so cost lands where the work is instead of in a general overhead that nobody can unpick at the end. What was delivered, what was used and what is still standing on site is recorded by the people who are there.

Paying people is where the module does its hardest work. Zimbabwean building labour is paid in at least eight different ways — day rate, task rate, measured work, piece rate and others — often on the same site in the same week, and the legal minimum has to be checked in the middle of the calculation rather than applied at the end. One engine handles all of it, work is claimed and measured before it is paid, and advances are recovered from the claims they were paid against automatically.