How construction paperwork actually works
Reference pages for the documents an Indian builder deals with weekly — how an RA bill is structured, what a bill of quantities is for, what a muster roll has to record, how Tamil Nadu land units convert. Written to be useful whether or not you ever buy anything from us.
Cent, ground and square feet: the Tamil Nadu land units, converted
Land in Tamil Nadu is quoted in cents and grounds, construction is quoted in square feet, and approvals are filed in square metres. Most costing mistakes on a small project start at one of those three boundaries. Here is the arithmetic, and where it goes wrong in practice.
Read the guideRA bills in construction: what a running account bill has to contain
A running account bill is how a construction contract gets paid in stages without either side settling up until the end. The format looks like an invoice but behaves differently in one critical way: every RA bill is cumulative, and the payment is the difference. Getting that wrong is the most common cause of a disputed final bill.
Read the guideBill of quantities: what a BOQ is for, and when you actually need one
A bill of quantities is an itemised measurement of everything a project needs, priced line by line. It is indispensable on a tendered contract and frequently a waste of three weeks on a residential one. The useful question is not whether to have a BOQ, but at which stage of the job it earns its cost.
Read the guideThe muster roll: recording labour attendance on a construction site
The attendance register on a construction site does three jobs at once: it is a statutory record, it is the basis of the weekly wage payment, and it is the only honest source of labour cost per site. Most sites keep it well enough for the second job and badly enough that the first and third fail.
Read the guideCMDA or DTCP: which planning authority governs your project
Which authority approves a plan in Tamil Nadu depends on where the land sits, and the boundary is not the one most people assume. Getting this wrong before purchase is expensive, because the answer changes the permissible development, the timeline and occasionally whether the plot can be built on at all.
Read the guideWhat a site cost report should tell you, and what most of them do not
Most site cost reports answer one question — how much has been spent — and that is the least useful of the four questions that matter. A report built only on payments made tells you where you have been, at a point where the decisions it should inform have already been taken.
Read the guideWhat a construction contractor’s tax invoice has to contain
The fields a tax invoice must carry are prescribed, not a matter of style, and a contractor’s invoice has two particulars that catch people out: the place of supply is tied to the site rather than to either party’s office, and a missing field can cost the client their input credit — which they will pass back to you.
Read the guideWhat a work order to a subcontractor has to settle before work starts
Most disputes with a subcontractor are not disputes about work. They are disputes about what was agreed, argued months later between two people who each remember a different conversation. A work order is the document that makes that argument unnecessary, and it is worth writing badly rather than not at all.
Read the guideSite indent to purchase order: the two documents that stop material leaking
Material is usually the largest line on a project and the least documented. The site asks on the phone, the office buys, the bill arrives weeks later, and nobody can now say who asked for what or whether it was delivered. Two short documents fix most of it.
Read the guideThe site expense register: what cash on a construction site has to record
Every project has a category of spending that never appears in a quotation and is almost never budgeted: the cash a site runs on. Individually trivial, collectively significant, and the only spend on the project that cannot be reconstructed from anyone else’s records if it was not written down on the day.
Read the guideWorking out labour cost per square foot, and why your number is too low
Almost every builder quotes a labour figure per square foot, and almost every one of those figures is lower than what the last project actually cost. Not because of poor estimating, but because of what the number quietly leaves out.
Read the guide