Costs That Arrive Already Coded for the Accounts

Costs arrive from everywhere, coded by nobody

• A supplier invoice by email.
• A materials request texted from site.
• A subcontractor's paperwork.
• An engineer's expense.
• A parking charge.

Each one gets onto the job eventually, usually as a value and a description. What it rarely arrives with is the coding. The nominal code it belongs to, the correct VAT treatment, the division or department that should carry it. That gets applied later by whoever in finance is doing the tidy-up, working from context clues and memory.

Which works, in the sense that the numbers come right eventually. But it means every month contains a recoding exercise, and it means management reporting is only trustworthy after that exercise has happened. Ask on the fifteenth what a division has spent on subcontractors this month, and nobody can tell you without a day's work.

None of this is difficult work. It is just that the rules live in one or two people's heads, and the coding happens after the fact rather than at the point the cost lands.

The cost of coding late

This costs you in two ways, and the second is the bigger one.

The first is time. Hours a month of skilled finance time spent recoding lines that could have arrived correct. Take the hours, take the rate, multiply by twelve. It is rarely a small number, and it is work nobody enjoys.

The second is the decisions you do not make. If divisional spend is only reliable after month-end, then for three weeks of every month you are running on estimates. Nobody catches a division drifting over budget on the eighth. Nobody queries a supplier's pricing while the job is still open. The reporting exists, but it arrives too late to act on, so you are paying for numbers you cannot use.

There is a third, smaller price. When the coding rules live in one person's head, the coding stops when they go on holiday.

You set the rules once. This client's costs go to this nominal code, subcontractor costs to that one, and each line carries its own division and VAT treatment. After that, when a cost arrives, Build Concierge:

1. Reads it, wherever it came from. An email, an invoice PDF, a text from site, an engineer's note.
2. Finds the job it belongs to.
3. Applies your coding rules to the line.
4. Looks the code up where it varies by supplier or by item, rather than assuming a default.
5. Writes the coded line onto the job, with its price. Lines with no price, or no code it can resolve, are held and flagged rather than posted half-formed.

• Costs reaching the ledger correctly coded on the day they happen.
• Finance reconciling rather than recoding.
• Divisional and departmental reporting that is accurate on the eighth, rather than only after the clean-up.
• VAT treated consistently, regardless of who or what added the cost.
• The coding rules written down, and outside one person's head.

One rule per route.

The simplest and most common. Costs arriving by a given route, or for a given client, carry a set code. Quick to configure, easy to reason about, easy to audit.

Coded by what was bought.

Where the code depends on the item, it is taken from your price list or item records, so the line carries the code that belongs to the thing itself, not the route it came in on.

Division read off the instruction.

Where the department or division is named on the incoming order, it is read from there rather than fixed, which is what multi-division businesses usually need.

Blocked if incomplete.

A line without a price, or without a resolvable code, is flagged for a person instead of posted.

• Your coding rules, written down. For most businesses this is a short list, and writing it down turns out to be the genuinely valuable part of the exercise.
• Costs arriving somewhere Build Concierge can read them.
• A job management system it can post financial lines into.

• We write the rules down with you. Usually an hour with whoever currently does the coding. Expect to surface one or two rules nobody had ever articulated, and at least one that two people disagree about.
• We build them in. Typically one configuration per cost route. Supplier invoices, site requests, subcontractor costs, expenses.
• We check a month against the old way. The automatically coded lines are compared with what your finance team would have done, before anyone relies on them.