Scaffolding (Gerüstbau)
A scaffold goes up in a day and earns over weeks. The rest of the site sees kit that simply stands there — and those very days are your income.
How it is billed
Erection and dismantling go by the square metre of elevation, the standing time separately — by the week or by the day, counted from the base period written into the contract. Transport and travel are items of their own, as are ties, protective fans, nets and sheeting, stair towers and loading bays. Moving something at another crew’s request is a job in itself, not a favour. The quote must hold two figures: the base period and the rate for every week beyond it — without the second, the conversation about an extension starts from nothing. Areas and volumes are worked out in the program itself: you enter the dimensions elevation by elevation, 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 the extension. The programme slips because the plasterer ran late, and the scaffold stands three weeks longer — and if nobody gave notice in writing, at the final account it turns out „that was in the price anyway". Moving things disappears: somebody asks for the stair tower to be shifted or a tie removed, and the crew does it on the spot. Control disappears: after handover others alter the scaffold — a guardrail taken off, a deck lifted out — and the responsibility falls back on you if you have no record of the state you handed it over in.
Work it out yourself
Take the last three sites. Look at the erection and dismantling dates, count the weeks and subtract the base period from the contract. Multiply the excess by your weekly rate. Then check how many of those weeks actually reached an invoice. The difference is the cleanest income there is — the kit was standing anyway and nobody worked on it.
Five minutes a day
Erection and dismantling dates entered the same day, not from memory at month end. A photo after assembly: guardrails, decks, ties, the tag. Every extension notified at once, even in one sentence — the date of the notice weighs more here than its wording. In the evening: hours, transport, moves.
What the program watches for you
Scaffolding runs along a thin line in tax terms: merely providing the kit is not the same as erecting and dismantling it, and that decides whether you invoice under the reverse charge of §13b or with VAT. The program lets you set this per invoice and remembers how you bill a given client — but if one job holds both assembly and pure hire, ask your accountant before the first such invoice. It watches the §48b certificate, instalment invoices on long standing times, and the warranty periods. Additional work — moves included — is kept as a variation with the date it was announced.
At the end of the year
Your assets are kit standing at customers’ sites, and your income is weeks. Both are recorded against the jobs, together with transport, hours and kilometres. The annual accounts and the VAT returns read finished figures.
What matters is entering things regularly — the erection and dismantling dates logged the same day are your entire invoice.
