Job management software for builders: the payment notice

A main contractor's week is other people's deadlines. The client's payment notice. The subcontractor's application. The scaffolder's availability. The building control visit. None of them are in your diary until they go wrong, and then all of them are.

Every application starts a clock somebody else is counting

Under the Construction Act the dates that matter are counted from the payment due date, and silence has a price: miss the payless notice and the notified sum becomes payable whether or not the work was worth it. The order of notices, and who owes what when nobody sends one, is in the rules that decide who owes what.

Zirko does not compute those dates for you, and no honest tool would — the contract decides them. What it does is make the deadline a thing on the job with a status you named yourself, and a reminder rule with a lead time and a text you wrote. Every automatic message is logged with its trigger, its recipient and its moment, and the same thing cannot go out twice, not even if the run starts twice. After a status change Zirko waits a quarter of an hour, so a misclick sets off no customer mail.

The competence paperwork now has to be somewhere

Since the duties on dutyholders came in, the question "can you show the person doing this was competent for it" is a legal one on every building job in England, not only on tall ones — the duties are set out in competence is now a legal duty on every building job.

The file store in Zirko is a folder tree you build yourself, to any depth, the same on every project. For each folder you decide whether the site sees it: the office always sees everything, and on the phone only what was released appears. Certificates, method statements, signed site reports and photographs therefore live on the job rather than on whoever happened to receive the email. There is no version history — a new draft is a new file, so nobody mistakes last month's for the current one.

What was actually left over, per cost type

Costing runs on five cost types: labour, material, equipment, subcontracting and other. Each carries a markup for the firm that an individual line may depart from, and Zirko works in both directions — sell price from cost and markup, or the markup back out of a price you set. Contribution margin appears per line and per document, and if a discount pushes it negative it is shown as negative rather than clipped to zero.

Afterwards the same five types carry the post-costing: eight amount-bearing document types form the target side, recorded supplier invoices and consumption form the actual side, with the variance and an overrun marker. Delivery notes, letters and correction documents stay out so nothing is counted twice. You decide which documents count toward a project — that is one more movement of the hand, and in return a figure that holds.

Paying the chain without losing the deduction

If you pay subcontractors, the CIS deduction comes out of the labour element alone, which is why the split has to exist in the price list rather than in somebody's head. A service in Zirko is an assembly of those cost types, so the labour share is already there when the statement is due. If you are chasing gross payment status, the three tests, the £30,000, and the 90 days sets out what is actually being tested.

What it does not do

There is no bar chart inside a project and no critical path. Dates live on the planning board, where the people who carry them out are listed; a second schedule beside it would drift apart. There is no submittals or RFI module, no tender portal, no stock control, and no overhead model that spreads your office costs across cost centres — that is what your accountant is for.

Plans are counted in office seats, with field licences for anyone who only works on site. Nothing is metered by jobs per month. Fourteen days free, full range of functions, no payment details.