Flooring (Boden)
You lay a floor on somebody else’s work. If the substrate is bad and you do not raise it before you start, you carry the blame as if it were your own.
How it is billed
The covering goes by the square metre, skirtings and profiles by the running metre, thresholds and mats by the piece, lifting the old floor by the square metre, disposal separately. Preparing the substrate — sanding, filling, priming — are items of their own, not something done „while we are at it". The material has its own price and its own lead time, and parquet also needs days of acclimatisation in the room that cannot be shortened. Areas and volumes are worked out in the program itself: you enter the dimensions room by room, name every measurement your own way, and the total goes into the quote as a finished item with the breakdown — you can see where the figure came from.
What disappears on paper
What disappears is checking the substrate. Residual moisture in the screed, flatness, cracks, dust left by other crews — checking that is your duty before the first board goes down. Under a VOB/B contract you raise concerns in writing and before you start; whoever skips that carries somebody else’s mistake. Preparation disappears too: sanding, filling, priming, moving furniture, cutting to angles. And the acclimatisation days disappear — they sit in the calendar, not in the quote.
Work it out yourself
Take the last flat. Count the hours it took to get the substrate fit to lay on at all — sanding, filling, vacuuming after others. Check how much of that the quote held. Multiply by your hourly rate and by the number of flats in a year. That is work you did for somebody else and nobody paid you for.
Five minutes a day
The moisture reading with its date, before you start. A photo of the substrate — it shows cracks, damp, adhesive residue and the state the crew before you left it in. In the evening: hours, material used, offcuts. When the board starts moving two years later, the question is always the same: what was the moisture on the day of laying. With a reading and a photo you answer in a minute; without them you answer out of your own pocket.
What the program watches for you
When you work for a construction company, the program sets the reverse charge under §13b and watches the §48b certificate — without it your client must withhold fifteen per cent. Material issued to a job leaves the store and enters that job’s costs, so you see what you earned on this flat rather than on the whole month. It watches the warranty periods — under a VOB/B contract it will not accept less than four years, under a works contract governed by the German civil code less than five. Additional work is kept as a variation with the date it was announced.
At the end of the year
Material is the biggest item here and the easiest to lose: remnants, offcuts, returns to the wholesaler. All of it recorded against the jobs, together with hours and kilometres. The annual accounts and the VAT returns read finished figures.
What matters is entering things regularly — a dated moisture reading is cheaper than one floor laid twice.
