Attendance, materials, and cost by site — not by guesswork
Crews move between sites, headcount changes weekly, and materials are ordered from the field. The controls have to travel with the work, not sit in head office.
Check-in from a site with no reliable signal
A construction workforce is distributed by definition, and the sites furthest from the office are exactly the ones with the worst connectivity. Any attendance system that assumes a live connection at the moment of check-in will fail on the sites where headcount accuracy matters most — and the fallback is a foreman with a notebook, which is where the payroll disputes come from. Humaneti records check-in from a phone browser and stamps the site, so the record is made where the work is. A single foreman confirms the crew rather than each worker being individually verified from head office, which is the only version of this that survives a real morning on site.
Daily rates, piece rates and a monthly payroll
Site labour is rarely salaried. It is paid by the day, sometimes by output, often in cash, and the composition of the crew changes week to week. Meanwhile the office staff are on monthly salaries with NSSF and Tax on Salary, and both populations have to come out of one payroll cycle and one set of books. Humaneti handles daily-rate and monthly-salary employees in the same run rather than requiring a separate process for each, so the cost that reaches the project ledger is the full labour cost of that project and not just the part that happened to be salaried.
Which project paid for that excavator hour
Plant moves between sites, and the cost of moving it usually does not follow. An excavator that spent nine days on one job and eleven on another is billed to whichever site the invoice happened to reference, which quietly makes one project look profitable and another not. Humaneti holds equipment in the asset register with its current site, so a transfer is a recorded movement rather than a phone call, and the allocation that reaches the project cost is based on where the plant actually was.
Direct labour and subcontractors in one cost picture
Most Cambodian contractors run a mix: a core direct crew plus subcontracted trades brought in per phase. The direct crew appears in payroll; the subcontractors appear in procurement; and the project margin is only true when both are in the same view. Where those live in separate systems the margin is calculated once, at the end, when it is too late to act on. Humaneti codes both to the same project, so committed subcontractor spend and accrued direct labour sit against the same budget line while the phase is still running.
Retention, variations and the cash that arrives late
A construction contract almost never pays what the original quote said, and almost never pays it when the schedule said. Variations accumulate, retention is held against completion, and certified amounts arrive weeks after the work. Meanwhile the crew is paid every week or every fortnight regardless. That gap is the reason profitable contractors run out of money, and it is invisible in a system that records only invoices raised. Humaneti keeps committed cost against the project as it is incurred, so the view is what has been spent and promised rather than what has been billed — which is the number that tells you whether the next payroll is covered before the certificate arrives.
Safety records that exist before the incident
Induction, toolbox talks, and who was issued which equipment are records that cost almost nothing to keep and are extremely expensive to lack. The difficulty is that they are created on site, in conditions where a clipboard is the path of least resistance, and they are needed at head office months later. Humaneti records the induction and the issue against the worker at the point it happens, from the same phone the foreman uses for attendance, so who was inducted, on what date, at which site is answerable without a search. Where a subcontracted crew is on site, the same record covers them — which is usually the gap, because subcontractors are the people least likely to appear in anyone's HR system.
Materials that arrive at the site, not the office
Procurement in construction has a delivery problem that office procurement does not: the goods arrive where nobody is checking them against an order. A load of cement received by whoever was nearest, signed on a delivery note that goes into a truck cab, is a receipt nobody can match to a purchase order three weeks later when the supplier invoices for more than was delivered. Humaneti lets the receipt be recorded at the site against the order it belongs to, so a short delivery is a discrepancy found on the day rather than a dispute at month-end — and the project cost reflects what actually arrived rather than what was ordered.
Mobilising a crew for a job that starts on Monday
Construction hiring runs on a different clock from everything else: a project is awarded, and thirty people are needed at a site within a fortnight, many of whom have worked for you before on a job that finished eight months ago. Rebuilding that list from memory and phone contacts is how mobilisation slips, and it is why the same worker is re-inducted, re-documented and sometimes re-issued equipment they already hold. Humaneti keeps former workers as records rather than as history, with their trade, their previous sites and their induction status intact, so mobilising a known crew is a selection rather than a recruitment. The ones who genuinely are new go through the full process; the ones who are not, do not.
What a site needs to report before payroll can close
- The crew present each day, confirmed by the foreman who was there.
- Daily-rate and piece-rate work separated, so neither is paid on the other's basis.
- Hours coded to the project they were worked on, not to the site office.
- Plant movements recorded, so equipment cost lands on the right job.
- Subcontractor crews on site recorded, even though they are not on your payroll.
Problems we hear about
Site attendance is kept on paper muster sheets per foreman
Direct labour and subcontracted crews are mixed in one list
Material purchases are approved verbally and reconciled late
What changes with Humaneti
- Each active site registered as its own work location
- Purchase requests with quotation evidence and approval limits
- Labour and material cost reported against each project
Recommended modules
Attendance tracking software for Cambodia offices, branches, and field teams: clock-in, shifts, breaks, timesheets, and payroll-ready records.
Project and donor tracking software for Cambodia NGOs, linking grants, budgets, purchases, and expense claims in one ERP workflow.
Cambodia procurement software for purchase requests, quotations, approvals, purchase orders, goods received, vendor control, and budget checks.
Humaneti Payroll software for Cambodia handles salary runs, tax, payslips, loans, and approval workflows for SMEs and NGOs.
A practical rollout path
- 1
Map the current Construction & contracting process, owners, records, and control gaps
- 2
Configure shared people, organization, project, budget, and role context
- 3
Roll out the highest-priority workflows with approvals and evidence
- 4
Measure adoption, exceptions, cycle time, and reporting readiness
Talk to our team
Get a walkthrough tailored to your operations.