1 · Off-plan sales & buyer register
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A sales tab that's out of date by month two. Buyer details copy-pasted into a dozen places. No link between a sale and the unit it's for.
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Project tools manage tasks, not sales. You'd bolt on a separate CRM and reconcile the two by hand.
✓
Each off-plan sale carries its unit, buyer, price, deposit and status. Buyer national IDs encrypted and access-controlled.
2 · Milestone-linked payment plans
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A fixed-date payment schedule that nobody updates when the programme slips. Chasing instalments is a memory exercise.
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Some tools track invoices, but they don't know your construction milestones, so "due when foundation is complete" isn't a thing they model.
✓
Developer-financed, rent-to-own or structured plans, generated in seconds: each instalment tied to the construction milestone that triggers it. Paid vs outstanding is one screen. The plan keeps itself honest as the build moves.
3 · Budget vs draws (cost control)
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A budget sheet and a separate draws sheet. Variance is a manual subtraction that's wrong by month three.
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Heavyweight construction-finance tools exist but are priced and built for large US GCs, not a local developer with two blocks.
✓
Budget lines with budget / committed / spent and live variance by line. Draws link to the milestone they pay for, so finance and the programme never drift apart.
4 · Construction schedule & progress
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A Gantt someone drew once and stopped maintaining. "% complete" is whatever the site manager says on the phone.
✓
Project tools do schedules well: that's their core. But it lives apart from your sales, payments and handover.
✓
Milestones with planned vs actual dates, status and % complete, in the same system that runs the payment plans those milestones trigger.
5 · Document register (permits, drawings)
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A shared drive anyone can rename. "Which is the latest permit?" is a recurring question.
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Document modules exist but are often an upsell tier, and access control is coarse.
✓
Permits, drawings, certificates and contracts stored against the project, kept in one controlled place, not a public folder.
6 · Snagging / punch list at handover
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A paper snag list per unit, photographed, then lost. No link to the unit or to maintenance afterwards.
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Some have a punch-list feature, but it ends at "closed"; it doesn't carry into operating the building.
✓
A snag list per unit, by severity and status. Any snag can become a maintenance ticket so a defect found at handover keeps being tracked once the building is live.
7 · Handover → owner onboarding
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At handover you re-key every buyer's details into a separate management system to create their account. Error-prone, slow.
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Project tools end at handover. The owner relationship that starts there is someone else's system entirely.
✓
CautaManage carries a completed sale straight into managed ownership — no re-keying, no gap between developer and manager. See the handover flow in a demo.
8 · Local payments (mobile money, cards)
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Manual. You reconcile transfers against your sales sheet by hand.
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International card processors at best. MoMo doesn't exist on their roadmap.
✓
Local mobile-money and card gateways integrated. Local-currency native — GHS today, more African currencies as we expand — with USD supported payment by payment, not an afterthought. Accounting / ERP sync for your books.
9 · Encrypted buyer PII + audit trail
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Buyer IDs and contracts in plaintext on someone's laptop. No audit of who looked at what.
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Platform data is generally encrypted, but the IDs you enter are often stored plaintext, and the audit trail is export-only after a support ticket.
✓
Buyer national IDs strongly encrypted and access-controlled. Every significant action logged and auditable.
10 · Local pricing + support
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Free, but it's your time. The hidden cost is the reconciliation weekends and the re-keying.
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USD-denominated subscriptions (often $100s/month). Support hours in US or EU time zones, with no local context.
✓
Local-currency pricing. Support on your working hours, with local context. Onboarding by people who understand building in your market.
11 · BOQ & tendering
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The QS's BOQ lives in their own workbook. Bids arrive by email and get compared in yet another sheet nobody else can audit.
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Bid modules exist at the enterprise tier, but they don't price against your measured BOQ or commit the award into your budget.
✓
A measured BOQ by trade, element or location. Bid packages priced against it; contractors bid on equal terms through their own portal.
12 · Site & quality records (RFIs, NCRs, inspections)
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Questions die in WhatsApp, defects live in someone's head, and when a delay is disputed there's no diary to point to.
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Task comments stand in for RFIs; a form builder stands in for inspections. Nothing gates an NCR on corrective action and evidence.
✓
RFIs with ball-in-court tracking, NCRs that can't close without corrective action and evidence, inspection checklists scored on site with failed items flagged, and a daily diary whose photos stand up as evidence.
13 · Buyer visibility during the build
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Buyers call you. You type each one an update, twenty times, and hope you said the same thing to everyone.
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Project tools are internal. Your buyers were never meant to log in to them.
✓
Every buyer gets a portal login from the day they sign: payment plan, live progress, their unit's specs and photos, documents and financing. At handover it carries into their owner portal.