Industries / Construction
We configure Business Central around the way projects actually bill and bleed — not the way a demo assumes. Fifteen-plus construction implementations, run by engineers who have sat through a construction month-end.
Sub-models
How you get paid decides how the project has to be modelled. These are the four we see.
Most cost arrives as subcontractor commitments, so committed cost and subcontractor retainage carry the project, not your own labour.
Your own crews and equipment are the cost base, you are the one being held, and progress billing against someone else’s schedule sets your cash flow.
Design hours are billable project cost, and the scope moves while the work is happening — so change-order discipline is the whole margin story.
Capitalisation, draw schedules and multi-entity ownership matter more than crew productivity, and the ledger has to survive an audit years later.
The processes, by name
Job costing, WIP and retainage first — they are what a construction controller judges an ERP on, and where a general-purpose implementation usually stops.
Cost codes, committed cost and work-in-progress schedules that tie to the general ledger — not a spreadsheet reconciled at month-end.
Held on both sides: what your clients hold on you, and what you hold on subcontractors — tracked and released on the schedule the contract says, not the schedule someone remembers.
Priced, approved and reflected in the forecast before the work happens — so margin doesn’t leak between versions of the contract.
Purchase order, receipt and vendor invoice reconciled line by line. A mismatch raises a legible exception — it never posts a wrong figure quietly.
Percentage-of-completion or completed-contract, driven from the cost that has actually posted, so the revenue on the income statement is the revenue the job earned this month.
The part that gets tested
Construction cash flow is rarely lost on price. It is lost on documents that were not ready when the draw was due.
Tracked against the subcontractor and the payment, so a missing waiver stops a cheque before it leaves rather than after the draw is refused.
Separate legal entities, shared jobs and intercompany cost transfers modelled properly, so consolidated reporting does not need a rebuild every quarter.
What the budget was, what changed it, who approved it and when — recoverable years later without asking the person who happened to be there.
Our apps that earn their keep here
Software we already ship for this work.
Supplier invoice processing
Vendor invoice to posted purchase invoice, inside Business Central. The invoice is treated as a claim and reconciled against BC’s own order and posted receipt, so a mis-read number raises a legible exception instead of posting a wrong figure.
On Microsoft AppSource
Project and resource scheduling
Visual Gantt and finite resource scheduling for Business Central Projects — capacity, over-allocation and delivery dates on one board.
On Microsoft AppSource (opens the marketplace listing in a new tab)
Process documentation
An AI process-capture platform. A Chrome extension records what you actually click; the guide writes itself — narrated, in four reading modes, shareable by link. Includes a Business Central assistant that explains the screen you are on, cited to Microsoft Learn.
On Microsoft AppSource (opens the marketplace listing in a new tab)
Every app above is implemented by the team that built it — one contract, one accountable engineering group.
How we deliver
FitShipRunFit to standard first
Most requirements are configuration, not code.
Build like it ships
Custom work held to our marketplace bar.
Run it with you
We stay through your first month-end close.
Straight answers
Including the ones where the honest answer is that we are not the right firm.
Sometimes you should, and we will say so. Business Central is the right answer when you want one ledger for the whole company and construction-shaped project accounting on top of it. It is the wrong answer when your business is estimating and takeoff first and accounting second. That is a fit-phase conversation, not a sales one.
Payables retainage and receivables retention are both workable in standard Business Central once the posting setup is right, and getting that setup right is exactly the kind of thing that is cheap in week three and expensive in month eight. The half that is usually missed is subcontractor retainage — what you hold, not what is held on you.
Job budgets are versioned and the change order posts against the job, so the current forecast and the original contract are both still answerable. The failure mode we are designing against is a budget that gets overwritten and a margin nobody can explain.
Usually yes, and usually you should. The integration point is the approved estimate becoming the job budget — one interface, cleanly defined, rather than replacing tools your estimators are fast in.
Correct, if it is a desktop ERP screen. What field staff can be asked to do is a small number of specific things — time, receipt of material, a photo against a cost code — and those need to be simple enough to do on a phone in a hard hat. Everything else stays in the office.
It depends on entity count and how much history moves, and anyone quoting a duration before the fit-gap is guessing. What we will commit to before then is the shape: a fixed, priced scope at the end of the fit phase, and a go-live that includes your first month-end close rather than ending the week before it.
Next step
Thirty minutes, not a deck. We’ll tell you whether standard Business Central covers it, whether one of our apps does, or what a build would honestly take.
sales@dynamicspro.ca · Serving North America · 416-843-6575