A document flow system in construction provides many benefits. If well designed and implemented it reduces office stress, minimizes labor resource consumption, and makes it easy for the owner to retrieve needed documents. The whole system is redundant and you should use an electronic format. The final paper document is stored in the project box or folder depending on how many documents you process per project.
In construction there is little respect for processing paperwork. Contractors want to build projects, not deal with how paper is managed. But to gain a true understanding of what it costs to build a project and implement cost accounting, the contractor has to process documents in a meaningful way.
This is the second article in a series of articles walking the small business contractor step by step in implementing cost accounting in construction. This article focuses on designing and developing a document flow system for use in cost accounting. The next step after creating a document flow system is learning how to sort and process the documents that come into the office.
