A real-estate and construction firm we worked with was running its business across systems that each told a partial truth. Sales and bookings sat in one place, customer collections in another, and project costs in a third, with spreadsheets stitched between them. The questions the management most needed answered — how is this project doing, what have we actually collected against it, where does it stand against budget — could only be answered slowly, and never with full confidence, because the cash, the costs and the revenue all lived apart.
The pain was sharpest at collections. Money came in against units and milestones, but tying a receipt cleanly to the right project and the right stage was manual, error-prone work, and the project view of profitability lagged reality by weeks.
The challenges we had to solve
- Sales, collections and project accounting on separate systems, with no shared definition of a project that all three agreed on.
- Milestone-based collections that had to be matched to the right unit and stage, rather than landing as undifferentiated cash.
- Project costs captured late and inconsistently, so budget-versus-actual was always a backward-looking guess.
- A management team making decisions on a picture they knew was already out of date.
How we approached it
We made the project the common spine. Once every system agreed on what a project and a unit were, sales bookings, collections and costs could all be posted against the same structure instead of being reconciled across three. Collections were tied to the unit and the milestone they paid for, so a receipt landed where it belonged rather than as cash someone had to allocate later.
On the cost side we brought project accounting into the same ledger, so committed and actual costs accrued against the project as they happened rather than being assembled at month-end. We rolled it out one project type at a time, settling the common cases before taking on the awkward ones, so the team gained confidence on familiar ground before the edge cases arrived.
Where it stands
Sales, collections and project costs now sit on one system, tied to the project they belong to, so a receipt and a cost find the right place without a spreadsheet in between. Management can ask how a project is doing and get an answer that reflects this week rather than last month, which is the difference between watching a project and reconstructing it after the fact.