Building Smarter: How Square Deal Construction Went from Legacy Systems to Modern Control  

Company Name: Square Deal Construction 

Location: Mauritius 

Industry sector/s: Public & Private Sector Construction 

Products used: RIB BuildSmart & RIB Candy 

With the implementation of Candy and its integration with RIB BuildSmart, we now get a much clearer picture of our costs on a daily basis. 

Shravan Kumar, Financial Manager, Square Deal Construction 

The Customer 

As a leading contractor with decades of growth across major public and private sector projects, Square Deal Construction has a corporate reputation second to none in all major building and civil contractors in Mauritius. The firm prides itself on having the global processes, systems, and culture to support operational excellence, boasting first-class operational performance and safety. Their services span infrastructure, excavation, beach, drain, building, landscaping, and pipe-laying works, as well as coastal protection, rock revetment, and real estate development. 

The Mission 

Square Deal Construction was experiencing business growth at a distinct disadvantage: their legacy systems couldn’t keep up with the pressure of a scaling business. They were facing certain challenges working from outdated DOS-based systems, which typically slowed down workflows. Their mission was to improve accuracy, speed, and control. They explored ways to upgrade their systems to achieve real-time reporting for enhanced transparency. They found a scalable, modern solution that would provide the financial and project control they needed to support their growing business. 

The Solution 

The firm went about modernizing estimating and project control by expanding their long‑standing use of RIB BuildSmart into RIB Candy with the intention to streamline and accelerate estimating and cost control. With BuildSmart functioning as their operational backbone (covering procurement, plant, and finance), Candy would be used for modern estimating, faster tenders, and integrated cost planning. Implementation was supported by training and guided onboarding to ensure adoption across their teams. By the end of the process, they had a fully unified workflow from estimating, to procurement, to cost control. 

The Result 

Following implementation, Square Deal has benefited from a range of efficiencies, including faster tender turnaround, standardized processes across all departments, better collaboration across disciplines, and a scalable, modern platform for continued growth. They were able to access real-time and trustworthy financial reporting, significantly improving transparency, and reducing risk. They broke down traditional silos to achieve greater accuracy, speed, and the ability to generate detailed reports for management and operational teams, and improved decision-making. 

In Mauritius, nearly all the big construction companies are using BuildSmart. This is because it is an ERP that includes all aspects of construction, from purchasing through to payment, from valuations through to payments, from valuations through to payments received from our clients, and we can manage everything in one place. 

Shravan Kumar, Financial Manager, Square Deal Construction 

Unifying workflows from estimating to procurement to cost control 

Like many growing contractors, Square Deal’s success brought complexity, which exposed the limits of the firm’s legacy systems. They previously relied on QuickBooks to manage their financial operations. While it was suitable for general accounting, the software lacked the reporting prowess to cope with their scaling business. Besides, it was never designed for the realities of construction – it was too generic for Square Deal’s purposes. And managing financial accounts and costs became a growing challenge. 

Financial visibility was limited, and reporting often lagged real project performance. It would appear that their growth outpaced their tools. 

• The team struggled to access timely financial insights. 

• Reports could take weeks to compile. 

• Management had a delayed view of project performance. 

Kumar is adamant that QuickBooks is not comparable with BuildSmart, not when the former typically imposed a thirty-day waiting period for accounting while the latter provides immediate costs. 

It gives us a better picture from a cost control point of view. We can monitor our cash flow, and we can be more proactive. 

Shravan Kumar, Financial Manager 

Fast cost reporting in real time at a click of a button 

Square Deal was one of the first Mauritian companies to adopt RIB BuildSmart. The platform enabled them to manage purchasing, payments, valuations, and client receivables within a single environment tailored to the industry. The difference was immediate. 

At the click of a button, they can get all the necessary information for accurate reporting – they can easily report on payments, suppliers, and subcontractors. The same goes for their clients and for debtor management. Rather than deal with delays, they can quickly see which clients owe them and how long they’re taking to pay. They can manage cost control on a daily basis in real time. They don’t need to worry about missing anything because it wasn’t allocated correctly. 

It’s a huge efficiency win that everyone in their organization is enabled, including tendering, estimating, accounting departments, and management too. Anyone who needs a cost report to drive proactive, corrective or mitigating measures can get it fast – and ensure real cost control. 

Efficiency is the big difference of modernizing and connecting Candy to the workflow. They can now compare the allowable costs from original estimates with the actual costs that have been recorded on the project. If anyone needs to see where they are on a project and what costs have been incurred, they can access that data instantly. It has effectively closed the gap between historical reporting and live reporting. 

Costs are recorded accurately, with no over-costing or under-costing, making the process much more precise. 

Shravan Kumar 

How a Construction-Specific Digital Foundation Breaks Down Silos 

BuildSmart brought structure and transparency to financial management, enabling departments to access accurate project data and streamline processes that had previously required significant manual effort. Further strengthening cost control, the integration with Candy brought an industry-leading estimating and planning solution into play. 

The integration created a powerful connection between tender estimates and project execution. Estimating data could flow directly into project cost control processes, allowing the team to track performance against the original tender daily. 

The live, integrated digital environment enabled the Square Deal team to compare tender estimates with actual costs in real time, meaning they could identify issues early and act immediately. 

For the first time, the company had a system that connected estimating, financial management, and project controls into one cohesive environment. 

Estimating processes are faster and more accurate. The integration and, in fact, the move to Candy has helped the business scale its commercial and estimating processes to match their growth. Kumar emphasizes that they get precise cost control and from a tendering point of view, they can get as many reports as they need. It helps provide management with a clearer, more comprehensive picture. They can pinpoint the allowables, for example, and costs to date. Predictability has been improved, which enables proactive management.  

The digital connection extended beyond workflows across teams and how they collaborate as well. Kumar recalls printing out their cost reports previously and sending copies out to the site. Some big projects amounted to hundred-page reports or longer. Each page would be scanned and sent to the manager, to the quantity surveyor, the site manager, and to the clerk. Each person would go through the pages one by one to check for any outstanding costs or over-costing or for incorrect entities. That’s a laborious, time-consuming, and highly error-prone process. 

With Candy, right from the start, the requisition is captured and processed through to completion, and it is allocated correctly. This ensures that costs are accurately recorded, making the process much more precise than the paper-based routine. 

The impact of real-time reporting on decision-making across finance and project delivery is that the silos of old have been broken down. Site teams, finance teams, and management now work from a shared source of truth. Each team knows what the other teams are doing. It has enabled Square Deal to collaborate better and make smarter decisions faster. 

Kumar contends that construction companies of all sizes can benefit from a modern, integrated construction-specific ERP solution. They describe themselves at Square Deal Construction as happy with the combination of RIB Candy and BuildSmart. Management is happy, their accounts and finance departments are happy, the tendering department and estimating department are happy. It harks back to the fact that they now have a clearer picture of where they stand at any given moment in their growing business. 

All the reports that we get with Candy, we never imagined that we [would] get this type of reports and get them on a daily basis – even more detailed. It gives us a clearer picture for management, [and] also to get better control. 

Shravan Kumar, Financial Manager, Square Deal Construction