Three years,
still adding.
A building services contractor in Croydon, around fifty people, working in buildings that are occupied and still running. They started with Unibuild in 2023 and have been adding to it ever since.
The firm that has to
prove it was done.
SME Building Services is a building services contractor in Croydon. Mechanical, electrical and air conditioning: designing it, installing it, commissioning it, certifying it, and then maintaining it for years afterwards.
Their speciality is commercial refurbishment, which is a polite way of saying they work around other people. Offices, retail units, schools and healthcare buildings that are occupied, heated, lit and full of staff who need all three to keep working while the job goes on around them. University College London Hospital is on their project list.
Almost everything they do ends in a certificate. A gas safety record, an electrical test, a fire door inspection, a service sheet. So when a client rings to ask whether door B-64 was checked, they are not really asking about the door. They are asking whether you can prove it.
You can tell what sort of firm it is from who works there
- Operatives
- Eight, on site
- Supervisors
- Three site supervisors
- Gas
- Two gas engineers
- Trades
- An electrician, a plumber, a carpenter and an air conditioning engineer
- Management
- A project manager, an electrical project manager, a site manager, a commercial manager and a general manager
- Office
- Five people holding the whole thing together
- Projects
- Around 120, at any one time
- Clients
- 49 client organisations, using their own people and a bench of subcontractors when the work needs it
Five things that landed
on somebody's desk.
Every one of these was somebody's job to absorb. None of them appeared on a report, and all of them were eating a person's week.
Friday afternoon, filling in the pad from memory
Paper timesheets, written up at the end of the week from whatever the operative could remember. Then a day and a half of somebody in the office typing them into a spreadsheet, chasing the ones that were illegible, and guessing which job the hours belonged to.
"Can I spend two hundred pounds?"
A driver stood at a merchant's counter at half seven in the morning, ringing whoever picks up. Somebody says yes. There is no order, no record of who approved it, and no way of knowing what was actually bought until the invoice arrives.
The invoice nobody could place
Four weeks later a supplier invoice turns up for materials nobody remembers ordering, and it gets coded to whichever job looks most likely. Job costs that are roughly right, on work where roughly right is the difference between a job that made money and one that did not.
A subcontractor on site with lapsed insurance
A firm working on your site in March, whose public liability certificate expired the previous October. Nobody hid it. The renewal simply never got chased, and there was no system watching the date.
"I'll find out and ring you back"
A client asks whether a specific fire door has been inspected. Somebody has to find the engineer, who has to find the photograph, which is on his phone, somewhere in a camera roll with every other job he has been to. The answer arrives tomorrow, if it arrives.
Four things it does every single week.
There is a great deal more in there. These four are the ones that changed how the week actually runs.
The day starts with a scan, not a pad
There is a printed code on a poster at the site gate. An operative opens the app, scans it, takes the photograph it asks for, and that is them on the clock, on the right job. The time comes from the server rather than the phone, so nobody can adjust it later by changing their clock. Roughly two thirds of all hours now arrive this way instead of on paper.
Nothing gets bought without an order
The driver at the counter raises the order on his phone. A named approver gets a notification and answers it, usually inside a minute. Only then is an order number issued. When the invoice turns up four weeks later it already knows which order and which job it belongs to.
The evidence is written in front of the thing
Inspections are filled in standing at the asset, not back at the van. The photographs and the signature attach to that record rather than to a camera roll, so the fire door, its history, its photographs and the name of whoever signed it all live in the same place, permanently.
The client looks it up themselves
Their customers have their own login. Registers, certificates and approved photographs are there whenever they want them, at any hour, without ringing anybody. Most of those questions now answer themselves.
The same five things, three years later.
| Before | Now |
|---|---|
| Paper pads filled in on a Friday from memory, and a day and a half a week typing them up. | Around two thirds of all hours arrive from a scanned code, already on the right job. |
| A driver rings at half seven to ask if he can spend two hundred pounds. Someone says yes. | He raises it at the counter and a named person approves it on a phone, usually within a minute. |
| The invoice turns up four weeks later and gets coded to whichever job seems likely. | It sits against the order it belongs to, with both values on the same row. |
| A subcontractor on site in March whose insurance lapsed the previous October. | Checked every night. An expired certificate takes that firm off the list until it is replaced. |
| The client rings to ask whether door B-64 has been done. Somebody rings back tomorrow. | The client opens their own login and reads the signed record, with photographs, at any hour. |
What that adds up to.
Four things worth knowing, counted from their live system in July 2026. They are volumes rather than savings: no saving has been measured at this business, so there is none to quote.
Times somebody has started their day by scanning the code at a site gate. Three and a half thousand of those carry a photograph of the person doing it.
Purchase orders have gone through since February 2026, and most of them were approved by a named person before any money was committed.
Fire doors have been inspected and recorded, almost all of them written up on a phone in front of the door, with a signature drawn on the screen.
The system has quietly taken a subcontractor off the approved list overnight because their insurance had run out, before anybody could put them on a site.
Nothing was switched
on all at once.
This is the part most worth reading if you are trying to picture your own first few years. Every step below went into a business that was already trading, and none of them required it to stop.
The start
Clients, projects and jobs stop living in four places.
The web system and the staff app go in together. One record per job instead of a folder, a spreadsheet, a diary and somebody's inbox, and the office stops keeping a second copy of everything.
Approvals
Hours start going past a named person.
Timesheets get an approval step. Every change from then on carries who made it, when, and whether it came from the app or the office.
The phone
The paper timesheet goes.
Hours move onto the phone, then onto a printed code at the gate. The day writes itself, with the time coming from the server rather than the handset.
Buying
A brand new part lands in a business already three years in.
Purchase ordering is switched on and carries nearly nine hundred orders in its first five months. This is the step worth noticing: adding something substantial to a running business turned out to be routine rather than a project.
Clients
Extra work reaches the client portal.
Additional work gets signed twice, once when it is instructed and once when it is finished, and the client can see both.