Site attendance and project expense, captured where the work happens.

The brief was not simply “build a mobile app.” It was to stop field activity from becoming an office reconstruction exercise.

For MS General Contractor, two routine records needed to begin at the site: employee attendance and day-to-day project expense. Both were easy to capture informally, but much harder to trust later if the employee, project, time, evidence and approval context arrived in separate messages.

The design therefore started with the destination. Attendance had to become a structured project record in Odoo. An expense had to reach accounts with its project, category, amount and receipt intact. The supervisor needed a fast interface; management and finance needed a controlled trail.

01 / ERP-owned scope

The app begins with the projects a supervisor is allowed to see.

Project access is maintained in Odoo rather than hard-coded in the mobile application. An allowed-users field on the project determines which sites appear for each mobile user. When an assignment changes, the business updates the project record; it does not need a new app build.

This is a small design decision with a large operational effect. The user selects from a relevant list, the project reference is valid before the record is submitted, and the office retains control of who can capture activity against each job.

02 / Site attendance

Check in and check out are project events, not isolated taps.

The dashboard puts Check In and Check Out at the top, where a supervisor can reach them without navigating through reports. The action carries the signed-in employee, selected project, date and time, and the available GPS location into the attendance record.

The same user can open a separate attendance list to review when attendance was marked, the corresponding check-out and the recorded duration. That history matters: it gives the field user confidence that the action was received and gives the office a structured record to review.

The mobile accounts are restricted to the application workflow. Normal Odoo access remains separate for office users, keeping the field experience focused without broadening access to the ERP.

03 / Evidence-backed expense

A site expense reaches accounts with the bill still attached.

Add Expense sits beside the attendance actions. Projects and expense categories come from Odoo, while the supervisor records the amount, a short description and the receipt or bill image. This keeps free typing to a minimum and gives accounts the coding context needed for review.

Submitted expenses remain useful to the person who created them. A supervisor can open an expense, inspect its details, view the attached receipt at full size and see the later vendor-bill or payment status. The mobile list is therefore more than an outbox; it is the user’s view of what happened next.

04 / Field continuity

Weak connectivity does not turn into missing work.

A construction-site app cannot assume that a stable connection will always be available. Attendance and expense records can therefore remain in a local queue when the device is offline and synchronise with Odoo when connectivity returns.

The important part is not only saving the record. The interface distinguishes a local item from a synchronised one, retains receipt uploads in the queue and gives the user a visible status. A temporary network problem does not require the supervisor to remember the transaction and enter it again later.

05 / Office control

Odoo remains the control plane.

The mobile interface is intentionally narrow. Configuration, review and reporting stay in Odoo under Supervisor Operations, with dedicated views for Attendance, Expenses and Expense Categories. Office users can filter by employee, project, category and status without copying the data into a second sheet.

Expense categories are centrally maintained and can carry the relevant account mapping. Projects and allowed users are also managed from the ERP. This keeps policy and master data in one place while the app concentrates on quick, accurate capture.

A returned expense does not disappear. Its state and review outcome remain part of the record, allowing the field and office teams to resolve the same item instead of starting an untraceable replacement.

06 / Financial handover

Approval can finish as an accounting result, not another data-entry task.

Accounts can review one expense or work in bulk. The project, category and receipt are already present, so the decision is based on the original field record. The configured category identifies the debit treatment, while each supervisor can be mapped to the appropriate petty-cash vendor and journal.

In the delivered workflow, confirmation can create the vendor bill, register payment from the configured petty-cash journal and reconcile the payable. References to the bill and payment remain visible against the expense.

The supervisor does not have to choose ledger accounts on a phone. Operational context is captured in the field; Odoo rules translate that context into the approved accounting treatment.

07 / Operational result

A focused app outside; a complete business trail inside.

The MS General Contractor application gives site users five obvious destinations: Check In, Check Out, Add Expense, Attendance List and Expense List. Behind those simple actions sit project access, GPS and time capture, receipt evidence, offline continuity, review status and accounting automation.

That separation is deliberate. The field user should not have to understand the general ledger to submit a valid expense. Finance should not have to reconstruct the site context to post it. Management should be able to see the project trail without asking both teams for separate files.

This is the kind of mobile system AutomaERP aims to build: specific to the work, light at the point of use and connected to the controls that matter after submission.