Finally knowing whether a job actually made money
A mid-sized Queensland civil contractor had no reliable job costing and was processing payroll manually each week for 47 staff. ERPNext gave them real-time project profitability and cut payroll processing from a day to under two hours.
Real-time
Project P&L visibility
80%
Faster payroll processing
47 staff
On self-service timesheets
11 weeks
Full implementation timeline
The Challenge
The situation before MRPsupport
This Queensland civil contractor delivers road maintenance, drainage, and site earthworks contracts across South East Queensland. At 47 employees across multiple simultaneous projects, they were operating at a scale where the old ways no longer worked. Timesheets were collected on paper, entered into Excel, and processed manually in a legacy payroll system. Project costing was done retrospectively — the director often wouldn't know if a job had made money until six weeks after completion.
With tender margins tight and subcontractor costs rising, this visibility gap was a genuine business risk. The team needed to know, in real time, how each project was tracking against budget — and they needed payroll to stop consuming an entire day each week.
The Solution
What MRPsupport delivered
MRPsupport implemented ERPNext with the Projects, HR & Payroll, and Purchasing modules active. We built a project template structure that mirrors their standard contract types, enabling automatic budget tracking as timesheets and supplier invoices are coded to jobs. Employees now submit timesheets through ERPNext's employee self-service portal, which flows directly to payroll processing.
We configured award rate calculations for their Enterprise Agreement and mapped the chart of accounts to align with their external accountant's reporting requirements. The full implementation took eleven weeks, including a parallel payroll run to validate the new system before cutover.
The Outcomes
Results at a glance
Real-time
Project P&L visibility
80%
Faster payroll processing
47 staff
On self-service timesheets
11 weeks
Full implementation timeline
“I used to find out a job went over budget at the invoice reconciliation stage — months later. Now I can see it happening in real time and make decisions while I still can. That's a completely different business.”
Craig Neilson
Managing Director
Want results like these?
Book a free, no-obligation consultation and we'll map out what's possible for your business.