How Safeplus runs construction projects and trading on one Odoo system

Two companies, one group

Safeplus works in UAE construction, and it also trades building materials. Those are separate companies inside one group. The trading side supplies the construction side, and each company still needs its own books.

Billing the UAE way

Construction in the UAE has its own way of billing. A job starts with a quotation and moves to a pro forma invoice. When the real invoices go out, part of each payment is held back as retention until the work is signed off.

Safeplus needed a system that already worked like that, so the team wouldn't have to bend a standard sales flow to fit. They also wanted to see, job by job, whether a project was making money.

What we built

We set up a construction project flow in Odoo that follows those billing steps.

• Quotations turn into pro forma invoices and then into invoices, with the retention amount worked out on each invoice.
• Every product and material used on a job is recorded against that project.
• Labour cost and material cost are booked at project level too.
• Each project shows its profitability, so managers can compare what a job has cost with what it has earned.
• The construction company and the trading company sit in one multi-company setup, so materials can move between them with proper records on both sides.

Day to day, materials and labour get booked to the project as they're used, so the cost so far is there whenever a manager opens it.

Running a UAE contracting business?

Retention billing and per-project costs are usually where a standard system falls short. See how we approach Odoo implementation for contractors.