The customer who found their own software.
Most ERP projects are judged on the day they go live. That is the wrong moment to judge them.
Multipave NW Ltd are a road construction and surfacing contractor working across North West England. They replaced Sage Construct with in October 2025. Nearly a year on, they are still adding to it, and one of the additions was not our idea. -
Why ERP software for construction is different
A contractor does not sell products. They win work, cost it, deliver it on site and invoice against agreed stages, with subcontractors engaged throughout. That model makes demands a general finance package rarely meets.
Three in particular. Project budgeting and costing at a level of detail that tells you how a job is actually performing, not just what it invoiced. Subcontractor payments under the Construction Industry Scheme, with verification and filing. And a connection between what happens on site and what appears in the accounts.
Multipave's legacy system had been overtaken on the second of those. Changes to CIS left it unable to handle the filing a contractor is required to do. There was no CIS capability in it at all, so the work happened outside the system, subcontractor verification included.
If you are weighing up whether your current package has run out of road, our guide to covers the usual triggers.
What the implementation covered
We delivered the project on f, across four packs: the finance foundation, multi-company for the group structure, fixed assets for a plant-heavy business, and advanced project accounting for contract work. Full detail on what each pack includes is on our .
Four specialist apps went in alongside Business Central. Pryme CIS for Construction Industry Scheme compliance and filing. Continia Document Capture for accounts payable. Yavrio for automated bank feeds. And one more that arrived later.
They went live on 1 October 2025.
The customer found the app themselves
A few months in, Multipave needed to handle retention receivables. These are the retainage rules governing how and when money is released to subcontractors, and they are fiddly, sector-specific and genuinely difficult to run manually.
In many ERP projects this is where things get expensive. The requirement was not in the original scope. The obvious routes are custom development, a workaround, or a conversation about whether the platform was the right choice.
None of that happened. Multipave identified a specialist add-on in the Business Central ecosystem, brought it to us, and we worked with the publisher to deploy it.
A customer knowing their own business better than we do is not an inconvenience. It is the point.
Why that matters more than the go-live
This is the question most contractors are really asking when they evaluate ERP software for construction. Not "can it do what I need today", but "what happens when I need something it does not do yet".
There are three answers to that, and only one of them is good. Pay a developer to build it and own the maintenance forever. Live with a workaround. Or find that someone has already built it properly and pay a small monthly fee.
A platform with a real ecosystem behind it gives you the third option. That is worth more over five years than any feature comparison run on day one. It is also one of the things worth probing when you , because how a partner handles an out-of-scope requirement tells you a great deal.
Nearly a year on
CIS filing and subcontractor verification now run inside the finance system rather than beside it. The business holds detailed project budgets and costings, with reporting to match. Approval workflows have been extended, with more people still to be brought in. Retention receivables are handled automatically against construction retainage rules.
And they are not finished. Power BI dashboards are in progress, with work in progress postings back on the table.
For a contractor asking whether ERP software for construction will still fit in three years, a customer who is still extending their system nearly a year after go-live is a more useful answer than any feature list.
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Thinking about replacing your construction finance system? If CIS filing sits outside your accounts, project costing is a spreadsheet exercise, or your software cannot keep pace with legislation, . Fixed scope, fixed price, no scoping fee.