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

MS General Contractor needed site attendance and project expenses to reach the office with the employee, project and supporting evidence already recorded.

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.

Supervisors select from their assigned projects, so each submission carries a valid project reference. Office users control who can record activity against each job.

02 / Site attendance

Record check-in and check-out against the project.

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.

A supervisor can open a submitted expense, inspect its details, view the receipt at full size and check the later vendor-bill or payment status.

04 / Field continuity

Attendance and expenses can be saved offline.

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 interface distinguishes local records from synchronised ones and keeps pending receipts in the upload queue. Supervisors can check the status without entering the transaction again.

05 / Office control

Configuration, review and reporting remain in Odoo.

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

Approved expenses can create the bill and payment records.

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

Site records remain available through review and payment.

The MS General Contractor application gives site users five main actions: 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.

The app supports site capture, while Odoo handles project access, expense review and the related accounting records.