Construction Accounting vs Regular Accounting

Regular Accounting focuses on the company-wide measurements of the profitability and loss, which the Profit and Loss will show the total revenue and the expenses. Meanwhile, Construction Accounting focuses on the crucial piece of information that is allocated to a specific job, which is called Job Cost, mainly consists of materials at the warehouse, labor, subcontracts, and other expenses incurred for jobs - Direct Expense.

In Construction Accounting, the Job Cost is necessary to analyze performance on other levels, instead of just from the Regular Accounting perspective. Job Cost can be further broken down into different Cost Code when necessary.

As part of the Job Cost, there will be an Estimate Costs provided for each Cost Code of a job, which to helps in measuring the progress, measuring performance and production, and give the historical data for future estimation.

In general, Regular Accounting is measuring a company/department performance; however, the Construction Accounting is measuring a job, group of jobs, or a particular Cost Code.

Regular Accounting is dealing with all aspects of revenue and costs, including overhead and admin costs; however, Construction Accounting is dealing more with Direct Costs.

Regular Accounting usually reports in an accounting period (monthly, quarterly, or yearly); however, Construction Accounting will reports on job-to-date in addition to specific periods per job, which can cross over multiple financial/fiscal periods. An example being a construction project that needs a few years to complete such as high-rise buildings, bridges, etc. 

Construction Accounting is generally built upon  Regular Accounting, which shares the same basic financial reporting for the operating and growing a business and preparing the annual company tax returns and allows the management to make business decisions. 

On top of it, Construction Accounting adds many complex layers of reporting mechanisms to show the contractor where their best customers are within the market segmentation boundaries.

Additional reporting needed for Construction Accounting are Job Costing Report, Job Profitability Report, Earned Value Report, Work-in-Progress Report, Estimate vs Actual Report, Payment Application, etc.

In order to provide a reliable Construction Accounting Reporting, various Accounting Method that will be used are Cash, Accrual, Completed Contract, and Percentage of Completion, which needs to records on-time invoicing, and on-time expenses records for a specific job in the bookkeeping, so that it only able to provide the management with the actual progress of the job, job costing, and job profitability.

Are you looking for an Accounting System for your construction company? We have a solution for you. Contact Us.

By SYH. 

Task Management Software Improves Prioritization

When running a company, department, or an individual team, it is of the utmost importance to motivate your employees in order to obtain the best results and ensure everyone is completing their tasks. As such, properly managing tasks becomes imperative since workers will have to conduct assignments that show real results. One way for supervisors to simplify this process is by implementing task management software in their department.

Pasti Nyala has a few tools but not fully utilized. Members need constant reminding and this can be quite tiring. I'm aware that reminding someone else is part of managing people. But some subordinates are just not cooperating. No doubt they are listening, but the end result or the improvement is just now showing.


In order for anyone to succeed in their job, they will need to have the focus and the drive to get their tasks done. Google for some articles on how to focus on work productivity and how to help subordinates improve concentration and productivity so that they have enough focus to bring results for the team and the company. 

Moving Away from Email Management toward Task Management Software

Often, managers have attempted to track the tasks their team members are working on through email. Using email to manage how workers are doing on their assignments may not be as beneficial. First, you need to wait until someone responds to the emails you send. Second, your workers are unlikely to provide all the information you need through an email.

Essentially, you’ll never be able to track the time spent on work among your employees or the workflow and revisions that take place by merely using emails or even face-to-face meetings. You will gain much more data by implementing task management software.

Incorporating a task management tool in your company can help you as the supervisor track the time spent on work and better manage workflow. This will give you more peace of mind since you’ll be able to see data more clearly and ensure your team is meeting deadlines. Essentially, task management software can bring better results for your company. Below are some of the main benefits of using task management software.

The Major Benefits of Task Management Software

1. Allows You to Stick to a Schedule

By utilizing task management software, you’ll be able to set up a schedule for your team members so that everyone knows when their tasks are due and when major deadlines are coming up. This is especially helpful when you’re working on different projects across many team members.

2. Improves Task Delegation

As a manager, you’ll be able to more easily delegate assignments through the use of task management software. This type of tool can help you utilize comments to discuss which individuals will complete certain tasks and what deadlines your team members can reach.

Some of the biggest difficulties with task management include failing to make appropriate business decisions and team members not completing what was asked of them, especially when a project is complex. Luckily, task management software is able to simplify the delegation of assignments, communication between team members, and general business decision-making.

3. Simplifies Remote Work

With the use of task management tools, you’ll be able to much more easily manage projects when you have employees working in different locations or even separate cities. If your workers need to spend the day at home and complete their projects that way, you’ll be able to track the time they spend working with the right tools.

4. Helps Schedule Meetings and Calls

Mobile phone applications and task management tools can also help you more easily message workers to schedule meetings and set up Skype or video calls when others are located remotely.

5. Simplifies Tracking the Quality of Work and Performance

With the use of project management tools, you’ll be able to more clearly track the quality of assignments received and the performance of your team members. You’ll be able to check the number of revisions an assignment goes through and help your employees improve the quality of their projects.

Prioritizing Tasks to Simplify Work among Your Team

According to an article from Inc.com, President Dwight D. Eisenhower utilized a very effective organizational chart for prioritizing tasks according to which tasks are important and which ones are urgent.

Essentially, there are four specific levels that tasks can fall into. These four levels are:

Urgent and Important
Urgent and Not Important
Important and Not Urgent
Not Urgent and Not Important

At Pasti Nyala, we called this Work Priority Quadrants or WPQ.

All assignments should be completed in a top-down manner after positioning them in the organizational chart. Urgent, important things need to be completed as soon as possible while urgent and not important tasks are more minor but are still time sensitive. Important but not urgent tasks don’t need to be completed right away but are important to work on long-term. The last items that workers should complete are the ones that are not important and not urgent.

By incorporating this process in your own life and using the organizational chart to prioritize tasks among your team members, you’ll find that more goals will be met and fewer projects will fall behind.

Instead of focusing on distractions, your team will be able to concentrate on more long-term projects. Stack methodology can be used to better organize and prioritize when team members have a number of different projects to complete and various day-to-day tasks.

The manager will need to prioritize all of the assignments according to importance and urgency, which will allow workers to complete multiple parts of different projects within the same week. Stack methodology will help managers better understand deadlines, revisions, and cost of delivery. Task management software can also help you delegate and prioritize projects across your team.

The above basically gives you better insights on Task Management and I would like to relate Pasti Nyala's TASKPAD to it.

TASKPAD can help you improve productivity among your team members by helping them prioritize certain tasks and more easily meet deadlines. You’ll be able to more quickly delegate tasks using TASKPAD function and comment sections to assign projects and discuss errors or revisions/updates.

Recommend reading:
Timesheet, And What it Means for Company and Employees Success

Tag Care for women - Jaga Jaga

Here's our pitching video clip called Tag Care 1.0, a Mobile App for women with features for safety rating, online assistance and reach out functions for counseling, reporting of abuse as well as self-education via an online workshop and short courses.

Be Safe. Tag Care.

View our short video clip below:

Berikut adalah klip video kami bernama Tag Care 1.0, App Mudah Alih untuk wanita yang mempunyai ciri-ciri untuk penarafan keselamatan, bantuan dalam talian dan menjangkau fungsi untuk kaunseling, pelaporan penderaan serta pendidikan diri melalui bengkel dalam talian dan kursus pendek.

123.47 Data Glitch

A system problem (excluding hardware related issues) typically confined to an Application problem (or Program Glitch or program bug) or Data Problem (in this case Data Glitch).

A stock market data error that occurred on Jul 02, 2017 set an undetermined number of companies listed on the US Nasdaq exchange to a share price of $123.47, sending some tech companies’ stock prices crashing and others’ soaring.

In a statement from Nasdaq said the culprit was “improper use of test data” that was picked up by third party financial data providers. The exchange said it was “working with third party vendors to resolve this matter.”

Improper use of test data could likely be:

1. a hard-coded value or parameters

2. a hard-coded business logic in the program

3. a hard-coded debugging logic set by the program developer

4. a test data or dummy data inserted manually by the developer into the production database. This act bypassed the expected data validation and doesn't ensure data integrity.

So to all Pasti Nyala developers, take note of the following:

1. avoid hard-coded values unless it is a preset lower limit or upper limit

2. debugging logic is meant for use during testing stage

3. above all, avoid back-door data manipulation (e.g using DB tools to insert rows, or update rows). Data must be created or maintained by a tested program.

Secret Software - GREYBALL

According to report by AFP and the Times, Uber acknowledged the use of a secret software program called "GREYBALL" to steer drivers away from trouble, including sting operations by local authorities to catch lawbreakers.

The so-called secret program to others is a business trade secret, or secret recipe. To Uber, it a valuable "tool".

This is how the secret "tool" works

1. The program denies ride requests to fraudulent users who are violating their terms of service. Whether that’s people aiming to physically harm drivers, competitors looking to disrupt our operations, or opponents who collude with officials on secret ‘stings’ meant to entrap drivers. And Uber said the program was used in locations where drivers feared for their safety, and “rarely” to avoid law enforcement.

2. Data collected about agents of regulatory authorities was used by the software to “Greyball” them, or mark them as city officials, according to the Times. Greyballed officials trying to use Uber would have rides cancelled and be shown fake versions of the app, complete with maps showing icons of ghost cars appearing to be on the move, the report said. Tactics used included identifying locations of government offices and then making them off-limits with “geofences” erected in mapping software, according to the Times. Ways of figuring out which users might be regulators or police included checking whether credit cards used for accounts were linked to governments or police credit unions, the report said.

When it come to secret tool, it may not necessary be another secret software. It could be something unique to your company and your company is very good at using it.

So what is your company secret tool? An efficient work processes and procedures? Excellent products and support? Competent workforce? 

Betting Robot

Can't trust your instinct in betting or stock market gambling?  There's a robot that may help. CNN published an article on  Robot making money off Trump's tweets.

Austin-based marketing company T3 has created a robot -- dubbed the "Trump and Dump" -- that analyzes Trump's Twitter feed. Every time the president sends a negative tweet about a publicly traded company, the bot automatically short sells that company's stock, which means the bot essentially places a bet that the company's stock price will go down. And they've been making money doing it, says T3 President Ben Gaddis. The proceeds are then donated to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

This "bot" is actually a software that automatically collect data (in this example, selected tweets), analyse it based on given set of rules and come out it a prediction. 

In this case, it's the stock market rules, whereby , a negative sentiment has a negative impact. Such is the perception. When a negative tweet goes out and has a negative impact on that company's stock, something positive comes out of it. 

Gaddis said his company isn't yet revealing how much money they've made, but he said so far four tweets have triggered the bot to short sell since it was launched in early January. They've made "excellent" returns on three of them.

Trump and Dump. Image: CNN

For example, when Trump tweeted about Delta's computer outage on Monday, the Trump and Dump bot was "all over it," Gaddis said, adding they saw a 4.47% return on investment.

Trump negative tweet

It might seem odd for a marketing firm to take on robotic short selling based on Trump's tweets, but Gaddis said T3 was perfectly poised to get the Trump and Dump bot up and running.

T3 says it develops social strategy for some major companies, such as Capital One and UPS. Part of what T3 does is build algorithms that can determine whether a tweet is saying something positive or negative about a company.

"All we had to do is take that knowledge and translate it into a trading platform," Gaddis said. He said after the idea was born, it took a T3 engineer two and a half days to get the bot up and running.

After this Trump and Dump betting bot, I'm sure there will be some tech-firm developing other bet bot to listen to other global leaders media comment and predict the market outcome.

Najib dan Jual, anyone?