Thermal insulation (WDVS)
An external insulation system is five layers, of which you see one. The rest vanishes under the render the same day — and the questions about it arrive years later.
How it is billed
Insulation goes by the square metre, but one square metre is not the other: thickness and type change both price and time. Base rail, corners and drip profiles by the running metre, mesh and finishing render by the square metre, fixings counted over the area, the plinth separately — below ground level a different insulation applies at a different price. The scaffold is an item of its own: erection, standing days, dismantling. The reveals at windows and doors are the most labour-intensive square metres of the whole elevation and belong in the quote as their own item. Areas and volumes are worked out in the program itself: you enter the dimensions wall by wall and opening by opening, 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. The program does not deduct openings; that stays with you.
What disappears on paper
What disappears is whatever you cover up. Whether the adhesive went on in dabs or over the full surface, the number and length of the fixings, the mesh overlap, the preparation of the old substrate — after a week none of it is visible, and a complaint five years later asks about exactly that. The weather disappears: you insulate neither in frost nor on a wet wall, and the scaffold counts the days all the same. The plinth and the zone at ground level disappear, where the material costs more. And the details at the windows disappear — reveals, connection profiles, seals — because the quote holds a single square-metre figure for the whole wall.
Work it out yourself
Take the last elevation. Work out the reveal metres at windows and doors — the perimeter of each opening times its depth. Compare that with the time they took, and check whether they stand in the quote as their own item or vanished into the price per square metre of wall. Add the days the scaffold stood because of the weather. Multiply by the number of elevations in a year.
Five minutes a day
Photos of the layers before you cover them: substrate, adhesive, fixings, mesh. Four photos per elevation, one per step. It costs a minute and is the only proof of how a wall is built that nobody will ever open again. In the evening: hours, material used, the scaffold day. The customer later gets an invoice with the items set out one by one — and that kind of breakdown is exactly what is asked of them when they apply for a subsidy.
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. It watches the instalment invoices: an elevation is weeks of work and a lot of material bought up front. 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; with insulation that is the most important deadline of the whole job, because defects show up late. Additional work is kept as a variation with the date it was announced.
At the end of the year
Insulation, adhesives, mesh, render, scaffold hire, paid hours — all recorded against the jobs. The annual accounts and the VAT returns read finished figures, and invoices under the reverse charge land in the right boxes by themselves.
What matters is entering things regularly — four photos of the layers before covering them are cheaper than one elevation hacked off.
