Notes tagged
money
25 notes on money. All notes.
Cost heads that survive a project
A cost structure is designed for the budget and filled by the invoices. Why heads at the wrong grain fail, and what makes a coding structure last three years.
Two payment ladders that never line up
Buyers pay on certified stages, contractors on measured quantity, and the space between the two schedules is what a developer's working capital actually is.
Working with brokers without a fight at payout
The dispute with a channel partner is almost never about the rate. It is about who brought the buyer, and about when the money is due to be paid.
Demand letters, reminders, and the buyer who says nobody told him
A construction-linked demand is a document plus a delivery. Most collection disputes are about the second half, and the reconciliation is worse than both.
What a price list does not tell you
The licence is the visible part. Migration, training, per-user pricing and the cost of leaving are larger, arrive later, and are rarely quoted at all.
Getting paid on time, from the contractor's side
A correct bill can still sit unpaid for weeks. There are only four places it stops, and knowing which one you are in changes what you should ask.
Month-end at a builder's accounts desk
The last four days of a month at a developer's accounts department, what must be true before the books close, and why it is always a scramble.
Quoting a rate you can live with
What actually sits inside a construction rate, the two costs contractors forget, and the conditions that decide whether a quoted rate survives the job.
When your ledger and theirs disagree
Balance confirmations never agree the first time. Reconcile events rather than totals, classify every difference by cause, and the argument becomes arithmetic.
Paying a labour contractor
Attendance, measured work, advances and recoveries. How labour contract payments actually run on an Indian site, and where both sides end up cheated.
A fact that had no owner
A payment made in instalments was invisible to half an application, because one plain fact was being worked out separately by every screen that needed it.
How to read a bill of quantities
A BOQ is a priced list of the work, written so that two people can compete on the same job. Reading one well is mostly knowing what it deliberately leaves out.
Retention money is a balance, not a memory
Retention is money you have earned, been billed for, and not been paid. It is held against defects and released later, and most people track it in their heads.
Running account bills, and what "running" means
An RA bill is cumulative. Each one restates the whole job to date and subtracts what was already certified, which is why the arithmetic confuses everyone.
A mobilisation advance is not an advance payment
One is a loan against future work, recovered from every bill. The other is a payment made early. Booking them the same way is how advances get paid twice.
Set-off, and what it costs you to use it
Netting what you owe against what you are owed is quick and tempting. It also collapses two records into one and removes the evidence for both.
Why staged payments break accounting systems
Most systems store one paid date per bill. A payment in stages never writes it, so every screen asking "is this paid?" goes blind on exactly the biggest orders.
TDS on construction payments, explained as a mechanism
Tax deducted at source moves a slice of a payment from the payer to the government on the payee's behalf. Understanding the mechanism prevents most of the errors.
Input tax credit, and why your vendor's filing is your problem
GST credit lets you offset tax paid on purchases against tax you collect. The conditions attached to it are what make vendor discipline a finance function.
Paying less than agreed is a statement, not a typo
A short payment carries a decision inside it. If the system accepts the smaller number silently, the decision is lost and only the discrepancy survives.
Work order or purchase order: which one you are issuing
One buys a thing, the other buys an outcome. The paperwork looks similar and the risk, measurement and payment mechanics are completely different.
Why one person should never move the company's money
Two different people on every payment is not distrust. It is the cheapest control there is, and every convenience that erodes it erodes the whole thing.
Money before material, and how to sign for it honestly
Paying before delivery is normal in construction. What is not normal is a system that hides which payments are advances and which are for goods already in.
Matching a bank line to the thing it paid for
A bank statement gives a date, an amount and a scrap of text. Turning that into "this paid that invoice" is a guess, and the rules around the guess matter.
Writing off money that is never coming
A write-off is a decision, not a correction. The amount matters less than the reason, and the reason is the first thing most systems throw away.