OpenConstruction

Job-to-cash management for construction and fabrication contractors

OpenConstruction is a job-to-cash management platform for construction and fabrication contractors: the businesses that quote work, cut and assemble it in a workshop, then deliver and install it on site.

It covers material stock, quotes and variations, site measurements, production, delivery and installation, labour and job costing in one system, built on Drupal 11.

The platform is organised into modules under strict data ownership: exactly one module can create or change each record, and every other module only reads it. That rule exists because the most expensive failure in this kind of business is two parts of the system reporting the same money differently.

Stock, cost and financial ledgers are append-only (corrections are made with reversing entries, never deletions), and every change to a price, a slab, a cost or a claim is written to an immutable audit trail. Access runs across multiple levels, and visibility of pricing and margin is a separate flag on the account rather than a role, so a supervisor can approve production without seeing what the job is worth.

Key features

Slab and off-cut inventory with three-level warehouse addressing
Atomic material reservation locked to a project
QR labels and reprints for every piece
Goods receipt with per-line condition, outcome and returns
Customer records and a date-effective price library
Quotes and variations, with sent versions held immutable
Site measure sheets with versioning, approval and impact tracking
Component-level linkage: measurement to material to work order to install position
Stage-based work orders with QC performed by a second person
Rework tracking that points back to the original order
Cut reconciliation that records consumption whether QC passes or fails
Delivery and installation visits with before/after photos and customer sign-off
Punch list that blocks job closure while defects remain open
Team rostering, clock in/out and per-worker work sessions
Two-step timesheet approval with date-effective labour rates
Cost ledger with three sources: material, labour and manual entry
Project contribution margin with a data-completeness indicator
Progress claims with retention, receipts and aged debtors
Two-year warranty certificate traceable to the original material batch
Operational reports, every list exportable to Excel
Multi-level access control with a separate money-visibility flag
Immutable audit trail on price, stock, cost and financial changes
Mobile surfaces for yard and site crews

Use cases

Stone & Surface Fabrication

Track slabs and off-cuts by warehouse location, reserve material against a job, and reconcile what was actually cut against what was planned.

Joinery & Custom Manufacturing

Quote from site measurements, drive the workshop from staged work orders, and hand over with photographs and a signature.

Trade Contractors with a Workshop

Run quoting, production and installation on one record instead of three spreadsheets that disagree with each other.

Fit-out & Installation Businesses

Manage several delivery visits per job, hold the job open until the punch list clears, and issue a warranty you can trace.

The public site explains the three things the business actually does - measure, fabricate and install - and invites a builder to request a quote.
The director's dashboard opens on what is waiting for a decision: measures to review, variations to approve and money owed past sixty days.
Each builder account carries its payment terms, retention rate, open jobs and outstanding balance, and archived accounts are kept out of new-job selectors.
Sell rates and estimated costs are versioned rather than edited: once a rate has been quoted, changing it creates a new version and supersedes the old one.
A quote breaks the job into stone area, edge work, cut-outs and the install package, and becomes immutable the moment it is sent to the customer.
The project view holds contract value, spend from three separate sources and the running contribution margin against one append-only activity log.
On site, the measurer records each run with its dimensions and cut-outs on a phone and submits the sheet for approval before any slab is cut.
A submitted measure waits at pending with the previously approved version overlaid line by line, so exactly what changed is visible before anyone signs it off.
Approving a measure freezes it and releases cutting, recording who approved it and when against every measured line and its allocated slab.
Stock cannot be reserved until a project, its latest approved measure and a specific measured line have all been chosen: the allocation gate fails closed.
A goods receipt locks the landed cost of every slab as it arrives, spreading the delivery charge across the accepted lines so cost is fixed at intake.
Every slab and off-cut in stock is listed with its lot, size, rack location, reservation state and the cost locked against it.
A cut order records who was assigned it, who actually did the work and who checked it, and reconciles the material physically consumed before quality control.
A fabricator's phone shows only the orders given to them, their crew's queue and the shared queue, alongside the off-cut rewards earned this month.
A retained off-cut keeps a three-generation lineage back to the slab it was cut from, the cost it still carries and the job it is being held for.
Reusing an off-cut earns a share of the stone value it saved, tiered by the size of the piece, and the whole month is approved as one batch.
An install visit records every piece taken to site, before and after photographs, any defect found and whether a return trip is still needed.
A warranty ticket traces the failed piece back through its work order to the slab and the delivery it arrived on before eligibility is decided.
Hours come from the stage scans themselves rather than being typed in; the supervisor verifies the week and the accountant approves and locks it.
The safety register tracks certificate and health-check expiry per person, with the contents of a health record visible only to a director and its owner.
Contribution margin per job sets contract value against material, labour and direct cost, and flags the jobs running below the target margin.
What is owed is aged by builder into current, thirty, sixty and over-sixty day bands, with retention held and the date it becomes claimable.

Tech stack

  • Drupal 11
  • PHP 8.3
  • MariaDB / MySQL
  • Twig
  • Bootstrap 5
  • QR & Label Printing

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