Construction ERP software runs job costing, project accounting, procurement, subcontractor management, financials and the project delivery side from a single set of data, rather than stitching those functions together across separate tools. For a New Zealand contractor, the difference between a system that works and one that quietly becomes an expensive spreadsheet feeder usually comes down to nine things: whether it does real job costing including committed cost, whether payment claims and retentions hold up against the Construction Contracts Act, whether payroll can handle a site based workforce, whether it copes with group structures, and whether the field can get data into it without a laptop. Here is what to test before you shortlist anything.
1. Construction ERP and project management overlap, and how much overlap you get decides how many systems you run
The software directories list project management platforms and ERP side by side under "construction software", which leads people to treat them as two separate purchases. The more useful question is not which category a product sits in, but how much of the job it covers.
At one end are project management platforms. Drawings, RFIs, submittals, site diaries, defects, safety observations and photographs, built for the project team. Excellent at that work, and not financial systems. Procore says so itself: it is not a replacement for your accounting system, it is not a general ledger, and it is not where you manage payroll or overhead. Contractors who buy one still buy a finance system.
At the other end are general accounting systems that will hold a job number and little else on the delivery side.
Construction ERP sits across both. MYOB describes MYOB Acumatica as closing the gap between site managers and the back office, with project manager dashboards and daily field reports giving instant updates and issue identification. In practice that means a Daily Field Report, a Change Order or a subcontract sits on the same data as the cost report it affects, rather than being pushed across an integration overnight. That is the real argument for construction specific ERP: not that it does accounting better, but that the delivery side and the money side stop being two versions of the truth.
What this means practically:
- Write down the delivery side functions you genuinely need, not the ones that demo well.
- Ask each vendor to show those functions and the job cost report in the same system, in the same session.
- Treat "integrates with" and "included" as different answers, because they carry very different costs over five years.
Some businesses still run a specialist platform alongside their ERP, usually because a particular client or contract type demands it. That is a legitimate design. It should be a decision you made, rather than one you discovered.
We have written about the project management side of MYOB Acumatica Construction Edition in more detail here.
2. Job costing is the spine, and most systems only do half of it
Every product will claim job costing. The question is what it means by the term.
Historical job costing tells you what you have spent. That is accounting, and almost anything will do it. What changes decisions is committed cost: purchase orders raised but not yet invoiced, subcontract packages awarded but not yet claimed, plant allocated but not yet charged. A system that shows spend without commitments will tell you a job is healthy right up until the invoices arrive.
Test the following in the demo, with your own numbers, not theirs:
- Raise a purchase order against a cost code and show the committed cost move immediately.
- Show cost to complete and forecast final cost, and explain who updates the forecast and how often.
- Show a variation from approval through to claim and into the cost report.
- Run the job profitability report a project manager would actually look at on a Monday morning, not the finance version.
If any of that requires an export to Excel, you have found the boundary of the system.
3. Payment claims and retentions have to work the New Zealand way
This is where offshore products most often fall down, and where the compliance stakes are highest.
Payment claims. The Construction Contracts Act 2002 sets out mandatory requirements a payment claim must meet. The regime is deliberately unforgiving, and is often described as "pay now, argue later": if the payer does not respond with a valid payment schedule and does not pay, the claimed amount can become a debt due and the contractor may be entitled to suspend work.
It is worth being precise about what does and does not invalidate a claim, because there is a lot of folklore on site. New Zealand courts have generally treated minor errors and inconsistencies with earlier claims as technical quibbles that do not invalidate a payment claim. What does put a claim at risk is failing to substantially meet the Act's mandatory requirements. See section 20 of the Construction Contracts Act 2002.
Payment schedules. The default position is that a payment schedule must be provided within 20 working days of the payment claim being served, unless the contract specifies a different period. Your system should make that timeframe visible rather than leaving it to somebody's diary.
Retentions. New retention money requirements took effect on 5 October 2023. Retention money is automatically held on trust from the point the contract allows it to be withheld, it must not be mixed with the head contractor's own working capital or other assets, and there are accounting, record keeping and reporting obligations, including providing each subcontractor with a report after each transaction affecting their retention money, promptly and free of charge. The regime carries strict liability offences. MBIE states penalties of up to $50,000 for a director and up to $200,000 for a company.
Sources worth reading before you shortlist anything: MBIE on the new retention money requirements, the retention money guidance PDF, and the consolidated Construction Contracts Act 2002.
Two things to be clear about with any vendor:
- No software makes you compliant on its own. It supports the record keeping and reporting; your finance team and your legal advisers own the obligation.
- Ask specifically how retentions held and retentions receivable are tracked, reported and released, and ask to see it rather than hear about it.
4. Construction payroll is harder than the demo makes it look
A construction workforce is not an office workforce. Site allowances, travel time, multiple sites in a single week, varied start times, different rates for different work types, and a payroll that has to file correctly every single run. Inland Revenue requires employment information to be filed within two working days of each payday.
Ask how the system handles time capture at the source, how site hours flow into both payroll and job cost without being keyed twice, and how it handles a person working across three jobs in a week.
Be careful about how payroll is packaged. This is one of the most common misunderstandings in ERP evaluations, and it affects the price. With MYOB Acumatica, payroll is a separately licensed product, MYOB Acumatica Payroll (also referred to as MYOB Acumatica People), which can run standalone or integrated with the ERP. It sits on the same platform, which is not the same thing as being included in the base subscription. Ask any vendor plainly: is payroll included in the licence you have quoted me, is it an additional module, or is it a third party product? All three answers exist in this market and they carry very different five year costs.
One New Zealand specific point if you are on older MYOB payroll: MYOB has announced that MYOB Exo Employer Services reached end of life on 30 November 2025, after which it is no longer updated for tax rates and thresholds. MYOB also stated at the time that the announcement did not affect MYOB Exo Business, which remains part of its enterprise range. If either applies to you, confirm your position directly with MYOB rather than relying on partner commentary, including ours.
5. Group structures and joint ventures will break a system that was not built for them
Very few construction businesses stay a single company. There is usually a holding entity, an operating company, sometimes a property arm, sometimes a plant company, and increasingly acquired businesses that came with their own systems.
Ask how the product handles:
- Multiple legal entities in one instance, with separate statutory reporting.
- Intercompany transactions, plant hire charged between entities, and shared overhead allocation.
- Consolidated reporting across the group without a manual spreadsheet at the end.
- Joint ventures, where you need to account for a share of a project rather than the whole of it.
This is worth testing even if you are a single entity today, because the cost of retrofitting multi entity capability later is significant. Camex Civil is a useful illustration: a family owned civil contractor in Cambridge that went live as one business and is now Camex Group, seven companies built and acquired, all on the same MYOB Acumatica instance with one finance team closing all seven month ends together. Read the full story.
6. Subcontractor management is a compliance function, not just a payment function
If subcontractors are a meaningful part of your cost base, this deserves its own line in the evaluation.
You are looking for the system to hold subcontract packages against the job with a value, variations and a claim history. Beyond that, ask about the compliance layer: insurance certificate expiry, health and safety prequalification status, licensing where relevant, and whether the system can flag or stop a payment when something has lapsed.
The duties are real. WorkSafe is clear that where businesses work together on the same project they have overlapping duties and must consult, co-operate and co-ordinate with each other. See WorkSafe on overlapping duties. A system that quietly tracks certificate expiry is doing genuine risk work, not administration.
Also ask how payment schedules are produced and how the statutory timeframes are tracked, because those obligations sit here too.
7. The field has to be able to reach it
The most elegant ERP in the world is worthless if the data arrives three days late on a crumpled timesheet.
The realistic question is not whether the vendor has a mobile app. Nearly all of them do. It is whether your site teams will actually use it. Ask:
- Does it work with poor or no connectivity, and what happens when the signal returns?
- Can a foreman enter a day's labour, plant and materials in under two minutes?
- Does it speak site language, or does it ask a labourer to choose a cost code?
That last one matters more than people expect. Camex deliberately built a single extension whose whole job is to translate ERP terminology into plain English for field crews, so someone on site is asked what activities they performed today rather than which cost code applies, while the data still lands exactly where finance needs it. Adoption is a design problem, not a training problem.
8. Decide your integration philosophy before you shop, not after
There are two coherent strategies and one incoherent one.
Broad core. Put as much as possible in the ERP: financials, job costing, procurement, projects, and payroll on the same platform. Fewer integrations, fewer failure points, one version of the data, at the cost of some best of breed functionality in individual areas.
Deliberate best of breed. Keep the ERP as the financial and job cost core and connect a small number of specialist tools for estimating, project management or field capture. More capability, more integration to build and maintain.
Accidental sprawl. Neither of the above. This is where most businesses end up, one tool at a time, each solving a real problem, until nobody can answer a simple question without opening four systems.
Ask any vendor what they have integrated before in New Zealand construction, how those integrations are supported when either end upgrades, and who owns them. A useful discipline is to be wary of app fatigue and hold the number of extensions deliberately low.
9. The partner you choose will shape the outcome more than the product you choose
Construction ERP is not shrink wrapped software. It is configured to your chart of accounts, your cost code structure, your claim process and your approval workflows, and it is configured by people.
A partner who has never run a construction project will produce a technically correct system that does not reflect how your business works. Look for construction sector experience specifically, New Zealand based support in your time zone, a written implementation methodology with named deliverables, named people on your project rather than role titles, and a straight answer about what a quote excludes.
We have written this up in detail in Choosing a MYOB Acumatica partner in NZ, and most of it applies whichever product you land on.
Which software works well for construction companies in New Zealand?
Start with a distinction the software directories blur. Most of what is listed as "construction software" is not ERP. It is a point solution that does one part of the job well and leaves the rest to something else. That is a perfectly valid choice, as long as you know what the something else is, and what it costs.
Trade and service job management tools. Simpro, Fergus, AroFlo and Tradify. Quoting, scheduling, dispatch and mobile timesheets for high volume service and maintenance work, and genuinely strong at it. Fergus and Tradify are New Zealand built. They are not financial systems, so you will run accounting alongside them and a separate payroll, and they are generally light on payment claims, retentions, subcontract packages and multi entity structures.
Construction project management platforms. Procore and Autodesk Construction Cloud. Drawings, RFIs, submittals, site diaries, defects, safety and quality, built for the project team and deep on the delivery side. No general ledger, no accounts payable, no payroll. Again, a finance system and a payroll system sit alongside.
Estimating and takeoff tools. Usually specialist, usually separate, and frequently the source of the numbers everything downstream depends on. Decide early how estimates get into whatever system holds the budget, because rekeying them is where a surprising amount of margin quietly disappears.
Entry level accounting with add-ons. Xero or MYOB Business with a job costing tool bolted on. A common and sensible starting point. It holds up until payment claims, retentions and subcontract packages arrive, at which point the spreadsheets start appearing around the edges.
Project and job costing platforms that sit on top of your accounting system. Workbench is the best known New Zealand example. Founded in Auckland and still headquartered there, now owned by private equity firm The Riverside Company, it is a modular project management and job costing platform designed to work alongside a range of accounting systems from Xero and MYOB up to SAP and JD Edwards. Deep on construction job costing, and it does not replace your finance and payroll systems, it connects to them.
Construction ERP. Financials, job costing, procurement, subcontracts, payment claims, retentions and the project delivery side on one set of data, with payroll available on the same platform. Options with a New Zealand presence include Jobpac Connect and Vista, both from Trimble Viewpoint, Cheops, and Premier Construction Software. MYOB Acumatica Construction Edition is the option Avanza Solutions implements, and because it is a full business platform it also suits contractors who have manufacturing, property, plant hire or distribution alongside the contracting arm. Professional services firms in the built environment, such as architecture and engineering practices, often look at Total Synergy instead.
The useful way to compare these is to count systems rather than features. Choose from any of the first five groups and you are running at least three systems: the specialist tool, a finance system, a payroll system, and whatever connects them. That is three vendors, three support arrangements, three sets of upgrades, and a reconciliation somewhere in the middle. The cost of ownership is the sum of the stack, not the sticker price of the one product you happen to be comparing.
Construction ERP consolidates that stack. Whether it is worth doing depends on where you are. A trades business doing high volume service work may well be better off and cheaper with a job management tool and Xero, and we would tell you so. Once you are running projects with payment claims, retentions and subcontract packages, across more than one entity, with a workforce spread over multiple sites, the arithmetic changes and the number of systems becomes the problem in its own right.
A shortlist worth building
Before you sit through a single demo, write down:
- Your entity structure today and where you expect it to be in five years.
- Your top three reporting questions that currently take more than a day to answer.
- Whether project management functionality is in scope or handled elsewhere.
- Your payroll complexity, honestly assessed, and whether payroll is in or out of the quote.
- The systems you are certain you will keep, which become integration requirements.
- Who internally will own the project, and how much of their time is genuinely available.
That document is worth more in a vendor conversation than any feature comparison table, because it forces the vendor to respond to your business rather than present their product.
Frequently asked questions
Which ERP systems work well for construction companies in NZ?
Worth clarifying first: most products that appear in construction software listings are not ERP. Job management tools such as Simpro, Fergus, AroFlo and Tradify, and project management platforms such as Procore and Autodesk Construction Cloud, each solve one part of the job and require a separate finance system and a separate payroll alongside them. Workbench, a New Zealand built platform, is deep on project management and job costing but is designed to sit on top of your accounting system rather than replace it. Construction ERP covers financials, job costing, procurement, subcontracts, payment claims, retentions and the project delivery side in one system, with payroll available on the same platform. Options with a New Zealand presence include Jobpac Connect and Vista from Trimble Viewpoint, Cheops, Premier Construction Software, and MYOB Acumatica Construction Edition. The deciding factors are how many separate systems you are prepared to run, project accounting depth, multi entity capability, New Zealand payroll and compliance with the Construction Contracts Act.
What is the difference between construction ERP and construction project management software?
Project management software covers the delivery side only: drawings, RFIs, site diaries, defects, safety and quality. It is not a financial system, and Procore states plainly that it does not replace your accounting system and is not where payroll is managed. Construction ERP covers the financial side, including the general ledger, job costing, procurement and subcontractor payments, and generally includes project management functions as well, so the delivery data and the cost data sit in one system. The practical question is how much delivery side capability your ERP already includes, because that determines whether a second platform is needed at all.
Is payroll included in construction ERP?
Not automatically, and this is worth asking directly because it affects the quoted price. With MYOB Acumatica, payroll is a separately licensed product, MYOB Acumatica Payroll (also called MYOB Acumatica People), which runs standalone or integrated with the ERP on the same platform. Other vendors package it differently, and some do not offer payroll at all. Ask whether payroll is included in the licence quoted, an additional module, or a third party product.
Do I need construction specific software, or will general accounting software do?
If work is invoiced on payment claims, holds retentions, involves variations and subcontract packages, and needs cost to complete forecasting, general accounting software will require spreadsheets alongside it to function. Those spreadsheets are usually the actual problem being solved. If work is simple time and materials with few subcontractors, general accounting plus a job management tool may be sufficient.
How does construction ERP handle retentions in New Zealand?
A capable system tracks retentions held and retentions receivable against each contract, reports the position, and manages release at the relevant milestones. The obligations themselves sit with the business, not the software. Since 5 October 2023, retention money is automatically held on trust, must not be mixed with the head contractor's own funds, and carries record keeping and reporting obligations including a report to each subcontractor after every transaction affecting their retention money. Confirm the requirements with your legal and accounting advisers, then confirm how the system supports them.
How long does a construction ERP implementation take?
It varies with the number of entities, the state of your existing data, how much integration is involved and how much of your team's time is genuinely available. Any vendor giving you a timeframe before scoping is estimating without information. Ask for an indicative range with the assumptions written down.
What should I ask in a construction ERP demo?
Bring your own data and your own scenarios. Ask them to raise a purchase order and show committed cost move. Ask them to process a variation from approval to claim to cost report. Ask them to produce a payment claim and a payment schedule. Ask them to show retentions. Ask whether payroll is in the quote. Ask what is not included. Watching a product handle your messy real example is worth more than any scripted demonstration.
About Avanza Solutions
Avanza Solutions (part of Verde Group New Zealand Ltd) is a dedicated MYOB Acumatica implementation partner in New Zealand, working with construction, manufacturing, distribution and professional services businesses. MYOB Acumatica is a product of MYOB, and pricing, licensing terms, packaging and product roadmap information are set and published by MYOB. Other products named in this article are named for the reader's orientation only; we do not implement or resell them and the descriptions are general and based on publicly available information. Avanza Solutions is part of the Verde Group, which also operates a long standing MYOB Greentree practice.
Information in this article is general in nature and does not constitute legal, accounting or tax advice. Obligations under the Construction Contracts Act 2002, the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 and related legislation should be confirmed with your own advisers.
