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Bookkeeping & back office

Your bookkeeper does the GST.
Who does the
payment claim?

Iron House runs the whole construction back office — Xero, GST, payroll, payables and debtors, plus the part a normal bookkeeper will not touch: payment claims under the Act, contract administration, retentions and variations.

01 · The problem

The office is the part nobody costed.

You priced the job. You did not price the six hours a week it takes to chase the supplier statement, code the invoices, get the timesheets in, file the GST, follow the debtor and write the claim.

So it gets done at ten o’clock at night, or it gets done in a hurry, or it does not get done.

Claims that do not holdA payment claim that does not comply with the Construction Contracts Act is not a claim. It is a letter, and it can be ignored.
Numbers that arrive too lateCoding done in a rush at month end cannot tell you a job is losing money while you can still do something about it.
Money left on siteVariations done on the Tuesday, never written up, never invoiced. Retentions nobody chased.
02 · What is involved

A bank rec and a GST return is about a third of the job.

That is where a normal bookkeeper finishes. Construction does not finish there.

The books

  • Xero setup, conversion and management
  • Reconciliation
  • GST returns and filing
  • Accounts payable — receipts, supplier invoices, statement reconciliation, batch payments ready for your approval
  • Accounts receivable — invoicing, reminders, debt collection
  • Debtor management
  • Payroll and PAYE filing
  • Hubdoc receipt management and the accounts inbox
  • Monthly reporting, dashboards and job cost tracking

The construction back office

  • Payment claims and payment schedules under the CCA
  • Contract administration — build contracts, insurances, Building Act checklists, disclosure statements, guarantees
  • Contract review — NZS 3910, NZS 3915, NZIA Short Form, Certified Builders, Master Builders
  • Subcontractor agreements
  • Retentions and escrow accounts
  • Variation orders and purchase orders
  • Quality control plans, ITPs and RFIs
  • Timesheets and site admin
  • Quantity surveying, markup and measures
03 · The coding

It only works if the coding underneath it is right.

Every job gets coded to a fixed standard — cost codes on one axis, jobs on the other. At any point in the build you can see what that job has cost, by element, against what you priced it at.

Get the coding wrong and the numbers still come out. They are just wrong, and they look fine.

The most common one: payroll posts to the ledger as a journal, so the wages never appear on the job cost export. Every job reads better than it is, and nothing on the report warns you. We have seen a single job come out roughly $10,000 light for exactly that reason.

We check the coding before anything goes live. Every time, including when you have set it up yourself.

04 · Who does it

Ankica.

Ankica came out of a corporate background and spent 25 years running the office of a construction company with Eddie. Contract administration, Construction Contracts Act compliance, quantity surveying, tenders, back-costing, budgets, Xero.

She is not a bookkeeper who picked up a few building clients. She ran the office of a building company that won awards for how it operated.

We work in what you already run: Xero · Hubdoc · JobTread · Fergus · Buildertrend · Buildxact · Builderprice · Proworkflow · Asta Powerproject · Bluebeam · Smartpayroll. Software subscriptions and membership fees are not included.