Replacing five systems with one: what actually happens

Most contracting firms are running about five: something for jobs and invoices, something for clocking hours, something for staff records and holiday, something for estimating, and something for RAMS and safety paperwork. Then a shared drive, a WhatsApp group and a spreadsheet, which nobody counts as software and which hold more of the business than any of the five.

The last row is the one to read twice. Four of the five categories go. The fifth is your accounting package, and it stays, connected rather than replaced.

Count a consolidation in the numbers you stop typing twice, not in the logins you cancel.

Published UK list prices for each of those five categories are in what construction software actually costs a UK contractor, and the half-hour method for finding every one of them on your own bank statement is in how to audit your construction software spend.

Clients and jobs import from a spreadsheet. Export a CSV from the old system, map your columns onto the fields, and read the preview before anything is written.

• The preview covers every row, not a sample of five. Each row is marked create, update or skip with the reason, so you find out that rows 31 to 40 use a different date format before you commit rather than after.
• You map the columns. Estimark proposes a mapping from your headers and you correct it, so a customer column headed "Acct Name" is a two-second fix instead of forty identical errors.
• Re-running a corrected file updates rather than duplicating. Clients match on name and then on email. Jobs match on your own job reference where the file has one.
• Your job numbers come with you. A job the yard knows as 24-118 stays 24-118.

Everything else stays behind. That is true of any move of this kind rather than a quirk of this one, and planning for it is most of what makes the month go quietly.

• Quotes and invoices already raised. They live in the old system and in your accounts.
• Photographs, PDFs and signed documents attached to old jobs.
• Timesheet history, accrued holiday balances and past pay runs.
• RAMS documents, issued certificates and induction records.
• The formulas in the estimating spreadsheet. Rates can be re-entered; the logic has to be rebuilt.
• The WhatsApp thread where half of last year’s variations were agreed.

NoteNobody re-keys three years of invoices, and nobody should. Export them as files into a folder you control, and open the export to check it is readable while the old account is still live. How to audit your construction software spend sets out what to export and how long the records have to be kept.

Import the records you will act on. Export and archive the records you may be asked about.

One month, with a single cut date, and the old system read-only from that morning. Run two live systems for a quarter and people use whichever is nearer, so neither one holds the whole picture and everything has to be checked in both.

Two dates decide the timetable and neither of them is yours: the renewal date on each contract and the notice period against it. Find both before you pick a cut date, because on an annual term with 90 days’ notice the day you are allowed to leave can be months after the day you are ready to.

1. 01Pick the cut date at a month end, clear of a VAT quarter end and clear of your busiest fortnight.
2. 02Two weeks before, import clients and live jobs, add your people, set who can approve what, and put your VAT and CIS settings in.
3. 03A week before, quote one real job in both systems and compare the two documents line by line. Fix the template before it goes to a customer.
4. 04On the cut date, every new quote, job and invoice starts in the new system. No exceptions: the exception becomes the habit.
5. 05Work already running finishes where it started. Re-enter the long ones, the maintenance contracts and anything with retention outstanding.
6. 06Through the month, keep the old system live but read-only. Nobody creates anything in it, including the director.
7. 07At the end of the month, reconcile one week of hours and one week of invoices across both systems. If they agree, the move is done and the old system is an archive.

Two live systems for a month is a migration. Two live systems for six months is a second stack.

Somebody was fast on the old tool. On the new one they are slow, in front of people, at a thing they were good at. That is the real cost of the change, and it is paid by one or two people rather than spread evenly across everybody.

• Take the objection literally. "This takes four taps and it used to take two" is a fact you can check, and often fix with a default, a template or a permission. "It was better before" is not something you can act on.
• Give them the migration to own. The person with the strongest opinion about the old system is the best person to test the new one, and the one whose sign-off the others will believe.
• Train on their own live jobs, not a demo company. Half an hour on the job they are running today beats a two-hour walkthrough of somebody else’s.
• Expect the first invoice to take longer than it used to. The fifth one takes less.
• Say what is not changing. Resistance in these moves is usually about being measured rather than about software, and answering the question nobody asked out loud is cheaper than arguing about menus.

The quieter half of the room matters more. The operative who never logged into the old system either, whose paperwork arrived on a Friday as eleven photographs, has one job in the new one: check on at the gate, put the hours in, take the photographs, get the signature. The Estimark app is on the App Store for iPhone and on Google Play for Android, and on any phone it installs to the home screen as a progressive web app with an offline field mode for basements and new builds with no signal. If that part is not working in week one, nothing else you bought is working either.

A system the office loves and the vans ignore is an expensive version of the problem you already had.

Because running the work and filing the returns are two jobs with two sets of rules, and your accountant already works in one of them. Estimark connects to Xero, QuickBooks and Sage Business Cloud Accounting instead of replacing them. This is the direction each part runs in.

• Sales invoices are pushed across as they are raised, with line amounts declared VAT-exclusive so the net, the rate and the VAT land correctly. Reverse-charge invoices carry the section 55A wording. See the VAT domestic reverse charge.
• Purchase invoices are pushed too, on Sage Business Cloud, and contacts are synced.
• The invoice reference stays against the job, so the job and the ledger entry can be tied together months later without a phone call.
• Payment status is pulled back each morning, so an invoice settled in your accounts shows as paid in Estimark without anybody re-keying it.

And this is what does not happen, which is the half an accountant asks about first.

• No nominal journals are posted, and your chart of accounts is not managed.
• No VAT returns and no Making Tax Digital submission.
• No Sage 50. The Sage connection is to Sage Business Cloud Accounting, the online product. Payroll data can leave as a Sage 50 CSV, which is a file rather than a live link.
• No payroll and no RTI submission. Approved hours leave as a CSV your payroll or your bureau reads.
• No CIS300 filing. Estimark verifies subcontractors with HMRC, calculates the deduction on labour, produces the statements and records the monthly return locked to its tax period. The return itself is still filed at HMRC. See how CIS deductions are calculated.
• No card or Direct Debit payments taken from your customers. Invoices carry your bank details and are settled by transfer. See getting paid faster.

Estimark is where the job lives. Your accounting software is where the return is filed.

The full list of connections, and the direction each one runs in, is on the integrations page.

The gaps, so you can weigh them before you buy rather than meet them on site.

• Estimark holds no security certification: no ISO 27001, no SOC 2, no Cyber Essentials. Procurement that requires one rules it out today.
• It does not chase your invoices. It shows what is outstanding; the reminder on day 31 is a person with a calendar.
• It does not import quotes, invoices, photographs or documents from another system. Clients and jobs, by CSV, and the rest is an archive you keep.
• It does not run payroll, file RTI, submit a VAT return or file a CIS300.
• It does not replace your merchant account, your accountant or your safety adviser.

Estimark is one subscription: a plan plus seats. Solo is £39 a month +VAT, Core is £129 a month +VAT and Pro is £299 a month +VAT, and there is a 14-day free trial, which covers the first stretch of a parallel month before anything is cancelled. The rate card is at Estimark pricing.

If one of those gaps rules it out, better to find out on a Tuesday than in week three of a migration. Estimark for builders and contractors sets out what one record per job actually holds, and job costing and CVR covers the part most firms are really trying to fix when they start counting subscriptions.