Interior fit-out & joinery — South Africa
Fit-out and joinery work lives or dies on the quote. Board, edging, ironmongery, imported handles, installation labour and site travel all move in price, and a number you guessed in a hurry becomes a margin you never recover on site. Tallium AI puts quoting, purchase orders, workshop and site stock, and VAT-ready accounting in one app so every quote is built from real costs and every approved job flows straight into ordering, invoicing and your books.
From $99/month per warehouse · billed monthly · no free trial
Key takeaways
Most joinery quotes start as a copy of the last one. Board prices moved, the exchange rate on imported hardware moved, and the labour hours were optimistic to begin with. By the time the client signs, the sheet has been edited by three people and no one can say which version was priced or what margin it actually carried.
Material issued from the workshop, extra sheets bought mid-build, a second installation crew for the weekend push — it all happens on site and gets reconciled weeks later. Without costs landing against the job as they occur, a 25% quoted margin quietly becomes 6%, and you repeat the same pricing mistake on the next tender.
Melamine and MDF sheets, edging rolls, hinges, runners, handles, adhesives and offcuts sit across a workshop rack, a store room and whatever was dropped at site. Nobody knows what is really on hand, so you over-order to be safe, tie up cash in slow-moving ironmongery, and still send a bakkie out for one box of runners.
Fit-out work is billed in stages with deposits, progress claims and retention held back for months. Matching those claims to what SARS expects on your VAT201, tracking which retentions are still owed, and finding supplier invoices at month-end turns into days of paperwork for whoever runs the office.
Build a quote line by line from your real material and labour costs, set the margin you want, and send a clean, branded document to the client. Save a full kitchen carcass, a reception desk or a shopfront as a reusable template so the next quote takes minutes and still prices off today's costs, not last year's.
Approve a quote and it becomes a job. Purchase orders, supplier invoices, material issued from the workshop and labour all post against that job as they happen, so you can see quoted versus actual margin while the work is still running. Convert to a deposit invoice, progress claims and a final invoice without retyping a thing.
Track boards, edging, ironmongery and consumables across multiple locations in one system, with reorder levels on the items you use every week. Issue material to a job and stock drops immediately, so purchasing buys what is genuinely short instead of padding every order.
Every invoice, supplier bill and expense flows into the accounting side automatically, with VAT applied on each line and receipts captured by photo and read by AI. Your VAT figures and reports build themselves as you trade, ready for VAT201 submission on SARS eFiling. Please confirm current rules with SARS or a local tax professional.
Cost-built quotes, reusable joinery templates, deposit and progress claims, and final invoices — all from one record, with VAT shown correctly on every line.
Raise POs to board suppliers and ironmongery merchants straight off an approved job, receive stock against them, and match supplier invoices without chasing paper.
Boards, edging, hardware and consumables tracked across workshop, store and site, with reorder levels so you stop over-ordering and stop running dry mid-build.
Double-entry books that build themselves from your quotes, invoices, bills and expenses — with AI receipt scanning and categorisation doing the typing.
VAT handled on every transaction with reports that line up with your VAT201 return for SARS eFiling. Confirm current rules with SARS or a local tax professional.
Build your plan in a minute — pay only for the parts of your business you run. From $99/month per warehouse.
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