HVAC Contracting ERP

A typical project runs like this. An architect calls about a new four-floor showroom. An engineer works out the cooling load per floor and selects units. Somebody prices the machines, the copper piping, the ducting and the labour. A quotation goes out, is negotiated, and is revised twice. The customer accepts and sends a purchase order. Equipment is ordered, received, and sent to site. A team installs it over six weeks in four phases, each needing sign-off. The system is commissioned and handed over under warranty. Two years later the warranty ends and a maintenance contract begins, and technicians visit on a schedule for years afterwards.

The company runs many of these at once.

Spread across departmental spreadsheets and WhatsApp groups, a set of basic questions became genuinely unanswerable. Which quotation revision did the customer actually accept — when three versions live in three email attachments? Did that project make money, when the buying price is in one file and the selling price in another? Which of the fifty machines on that site has had its second service, when the answer is in a technician's notebook? How much stock is on hand and how much of it is already promised to a site, when those are two different numbers and both are wrong?

None of these need clever analytics. They need the facts to have been written down in one place at the time they happened.

The design principle was that no one should ever do data entry as a separate task. Every fact the business later needs is captured as part of doing the work that produces it — the engineer filling in an installation phase is also, incidentally, creating the record that proves the phase happened.

That is what makes the system answer the questions above without anyone maintaining a parallel spreadsheet, which is where previous attempts had failed.

Access control here is not a formality. A Sales Executive sees only their own leads, designs and quotations, and cannot see buying prices or margins at all. A Sales Manager sees everyone's, and can see cost. A Service Engineer can look up a spare part and check its stock but not its price. Installation, duct, electrical, ventilation and civil contractors each get a minimal view of only the projects they are assigned to.

Sixteen roles in all, from Super Admin and Director down to individual contractor trades. Margin visibility in particular is enforced by the system rather than by convention, because convention is what leaks a buying price into a customer conversation.

The home page is different for everybody. Owners and directors see open leads, pending quotations, active projects, open service calls, contracts expiring soon and who is present today. Department managers see only their department. Everyone else gets a personal view — their attendance, their open site visit, and only the tiles they have permission to see.

Every tile is clickable, and clicking one opens the list filtered to exactly the records it counted. The number and the list are computed from the same rule, so they cannot disagree — which sounds obvious until you have used a dashboard where they do.

It is a web application, so there is nothing to install and nothing to update. An engineer on a rooftop opens it in a browser and fills in the installation phase from there; the office sees it immediately.