Construction

VeraTrack – Precise tracking of all aspects of Construction and Contract Management Projects

Introduction
Traditionally the construction industry has been slow to take advantage of the latest technology and business systems. Many construction and contracting businesses use several poorly integrated software applications to manage their businesses, usually comprising of accounts software and a plethora of spreadsheets.

Times have changed and tighter control and efficiency is more important than ever in an increasingly competitive industry. Today’s successful players realise the positive impact a modern integrated ERP system can have on their people, their clients, their projects, their suppliers, their business and ultimately...their bottom line!
Sense has deep experience in construction and contracting and recognised the need for an advanced, industry specific solution for this sector. We recognised that whilst Microsoft Dynamics AX had many functional and technical advantages over the traditional systems, there were also some key industry specific functional weaknesses.

Introducing VeraTrack
Sense is a founder member and shareholder in specialist Dynamics AX solutions company, Veratem. The key people in Veratem have a long history of writing specific software solutions for the construction and contracting industries and in 2009 launched their latest and most advanced solution, VeraTrack for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009.

VeraTrack is a suite of modules for Microsoft Dynamics AX specifically designed for use in the construction, facilities management and consulting engineers industries. The system is highly configurable to allow the delivery of functional systems tailored to meet the wide range of business requirements and methodologies prevalent in these sectors.

VeraTrack and Microsoft Dynamics AX provide a fully integrated, all-in-one system, automating manual processes and eliminating duplication from one system to another.  Its host of features and functions includes all legislative compliance requirements and easy integration to many third party applications. It also provides full traceability of transactions throughout the system for the life of a contract.

VeraTrack – Advanced Feature Summary:

Sales Contacts
The flexible approach to defining the sales contract structure means the user can set up contracts in a format that best suits the controlling, and billing, of that particular contract.  The multi-level structural approach provides up to 10 levels of dissemination thereby providing a highly detailed level of analysis. Sub units, or components, of the contract can be associated with different customers, different sites and even different billing methods allowing for a very flexible approach.

Contracts, and components, can be rapidly created using Wizards and the ability to flag a contract structure as a template enables duplicate structures to be swiftly created.

Cost recording is a vital element in controlling the contract, and components. The cost recording functions generate discrete records for hours, costs, vendor purchase orders and invoices, subcontractor contracts and has a cost summary capability. Similarly, charge recording handles multiple types of charge including applications for payment, stage payments, incidental charges, billing plans and adjustment charges.

Generating Bills
Whether you are using Time and Materials, Fixed Price, Billing Plan or Stage Payments and Cumulative Billing, VeraTrack provides easy processes to produce accurate billing.

An advanced charge proposal system allows comprehensive review and manipulation of charges prior to commitment including skipping, cancelling, application of manual adjustments, error reporting and history features. A further feature of this system is the ability to format the invoice using automatic and manual consolidation and the capability of automatic invoice line description generation. 

VeraTrack provides a multilevel advanced Schedule of Rates system for hours, items, costs and revenues, with standard and cost plus options to facilitate the generation of charges. The maintenance of the Schedule of Rates used to be labour intensive but now a system is also provided to do this, with functionality enabling uplift by absolute value or percentage, and back calculation and correction of previous charges utilising a charge adjustment system. Also associated with the Schedule of Rates is a comprehensive billing rules feature that provides rules by supply method to allow for capped charges, first £x free, charge up to, etc. 

The ability to configure a Billing Plan is also available. This allows for flexible periodic billing of repetitive charges and once activated will be automatically included in the billing process. The system also caters for the processing of Stage Payments and Cumulative Billing where required. Applications for payment are produced, managed and recorded, in association with a Certificate management system. The ability to use VAT invoice and Authenticated Receipt Billing methods is also provided. 

A comprehensive Sales and Purchase Retention sub-system is also available with retention tracking and reporting.

Budgeting
A budgeting system is in place that allows budgets to be set by contract, component or cost category. Budget monitoring and a ‘cost to date’ against budget warning system is also available.
Budget, or target, and actual cost and charge data is recorded throughout the system allowing for instant identification of variances.

Subcontractors and CIS Systems
The system has the ability to differentiate between CIS and non CIS subcontractors thereby allowing the relevant data to be stored and reported on. The ability to adjust the labour and material split upon subcontractor invoice receipt is present and VeraTrack is fully CIS 2007 compliant.

Subcontractor contracts can be set up to handle stage payments and retentions.

Job Control Systems
Where discrete jobs are also handled the system provides job logging and control functions. This enables the creation of jobs, with an associated component and automatic insertion into the contract structure, and provides a universal numbering system.  The job control functions manage job status changes, cost collection, billing and profitability reporting. 

Advanced Accounting Functions
At the core of VeraTrack is the advance accounting functionality, providing such features as:

• WIP Management
• Purchase Order, Subcontractor and Sales Order Accruals
• Comprehensive Rule Accounting
• Cross charging Systems
• Overhead Recovery Accounting

Other functionality
Purchase Order approval - an advanced approval sub-system is available with multi-level approvals, tolerance adjustment, point of approval or route approval and delegation features.
Supplier Rebates - a tracking and claims system for supplier rebates with multiple claim schemes, based on either volume or spend, and automatic departmental distribution of realised claims.
Supplier Classification - a tiered classification system with a ‘Find Supplier’ function.  There is also a Supplier certification control system which can restrict the use of suppliers that do not have adequate certification.

Reporting
Reporting is a very company specific topic and no two companies have the same requirements however a number of standard reports are provided, e.g.

• Job profitability
• Contract profitability
• Sales and Purchase retentions
• Subcontractor payroll and payment
• Contract budgets
• Outstanding Authenticated receipts to name but a few.

In addition, Dynamics AX is built on Microsoft SQL server, and so is accessible via Microsoft Reporting Services or any other ODBC-compliant reporting system, including Microsoft Excel for viewing, analysis and manipulation.