Industries
Your field crews are the constraint. Every admin hour you remove is capacity you did not have to hire.
How it works today
At 25 to 250 people the project side usually runs cleanly in Syntess, Metacom or AFAS, and the service side runs beside it. Work orders on paper or half in an app, photos in a WhatsApp group, material collected at the trade counter and never booked to the job. Measured mid-2024, half of Dutch installation firms report a shortage of skilled people and over a third deliver late because of it.
The monteur writes the bon by hand, takes photos that end up in a WhatsApp group, gets the customer to sign on paper, and hands it in on Friday. Or Monday. Between the last screw and the first invoice line sits a folder riding around in a van. That bon is what starts the invoice, and it moves at walking pace, because the package that was bought for the office was never built for someone in gloves on a roof.
The client asks for one more socket. The monteur does it. Nobody records it, or it lands on the bon unsigned. Meerwerk is not extra work you bill later: it carries a waarschuwingsplicht, and at the final settlement it is one word against another. Three taps and a signature on screen and it gets recorded. A form back at the office and it does not. RGS contracts typically exclude meerwerk altogether, so what unrecorded work costs you there depends on what that corporation signed.
The calculatie sits in Ibis or the ERP. Hours sit in a time app. Material arrives as purchase invoices from five wholesalers. Someone lines it up in Excel, usually long after handover. And what the monteur picked up at the Technische Unie counter was never booked to the job, so the pakbon is gone and a collective invoice turns up six weeks later. The calculator learns nothing from his own work.
At handover a file has to be there. The photos are on seven phones, the inspection reports in a mailbox, the product certificates with the supplier, as-built drawings with the draughtsman. Since 1 January 2024 the burden of proof for hidden defects sits with the contractor, so someone spends two days assembling that defence in the week the next project already started. Three years on, when the claim actually lands, how much of a reconstruction still holds?
What we build for this sector
Not a menu of products. These are the pieces that tend to pay for themselves first in this line of work.
The monteur opens the same app for a werkbon, a servicebon and a storingsbon, and that app keeps working in a crawl space where there is no signal. Customer signs on screen, photos attach to the building element, material lines pull article numbers from your conditiebestand, and the VCA check runs before the job starts. Hours go in once, so nobody fills in a werkbon and an urenbriefje for the same day.
Part of Field Service AppsSyntess Atrium, Bouw7, Metacom and AFAS each hold part of the truth. We build the layer between them: 2BA Unifeed and the Online Conditie Server for product and price data, ETIM on the material lines, DICO SALES005 for orders, pakbonnen and invoices, Peppol towards public clients. Bouw7 went to Exact in 2019, Syntess Group to Aceve in December 2025. Your layer hedges a moving roadmap.
Part of System Integrations & APIsA signed werkbon becomes a draft invoice the same day, from the roof, before the van leaves. A pakbon matches itself to the purchase order and the job. A maintenance contract raises its own work order when the interval comes round, instead of waiting for the customer to call. Progress instalments follow the actual state of the work.
Part of Business Process AutomationCalculatie against realisation per project, per work type and per monteur, with hours, material and subcontracting next to the budget. Werkvoorraad in weeks, because hiring or holding back is decided on it, and the branch average went from 46 weeks in 2023 to 31 in 2024. And if you carry a CO2-Prestatieladder certificate, fuel, kilometre and purchasing data come out of the same pipeline instead of a separate annual exercise.
Part of Dashboards & Business IntelligencePhotos, NEN 3140 and NEN 1010 inspection reports, product certificates and as-built drawings are tied to the building element while the work is happening, with a date and an executor. At the end it exports as one coherent file. That is what article 7:757a BW asks for, and it delivers the drawings and calculations a gereedmelding needs.
Part of Document & Invoice AutomationEvery corporation runs its own process, and its RGS contract fixes the words: which conditiemeting, which ingreepmoment, which status counts as afgehandeld. The portal has to speak their vocabulary, not yours, or your servicecoordinator spends the morning translating it back over the phone anyway. Build it their way and the pile of status calls goes.
Part of Customer & Partner PortalsSystems we connect to
An integration in this sector is never just talking to an API. It is: which ETIM class, which DICO message type, does the price come from the Online Conditie Server or from your own conditiebestand, and does the article number on the pakbon match the one on the werkbon. Get that wrong and the nacalculatie is fiction.
This is not an exhaustive list, and we are not a reseller for any of it. If a system has an API, a database, or an export, we can usually work with it. If it does not, we will tell you that before you spend anything.
Rules you work under
Since 1 January 2024 the contractor carries the burden of proof for defects found after handover. Proof means photos, measurement reports, inspection certificates and as-built drawings, per building element, traceable to the day and to the person who did the work. On top of that almost every client demands VCA, and in tenders your CO2 trede is priced in.
What changes
Today
Around 3,500 to 4,500 servicebonnen a year across 12 service monteurs. Paper bons in triplicate, customer signs, monteur hands them in. Photos live in two WhatsApp groups. Faults come in by phone and email and get divided up on a whiteboard. Material picked up at the Rexel or Technische Unie counter rarely lands on the right job. Admin processes the bons once a week, so service invoicing runs 10 to 15 days behind, and nobody can prove the contractual response time was met.
After
A werkbon app for the buitendienst that works offline, with a signature on screen, photos per installation, material lines pulled from the conditiebestand, and the safety check before the job starts. A dispatch screen that puts open faults, monteur positions and their certifications side by side. A link that posts the signed bon into Syntess as a draft invoice and an hours line, and matches pakbonnen to the right work order. A portal for the 25 largest contract customers.
The result
Service invoicing moves from after the weekly run to the next day. Material lands on the right job, so nacalculatie on service contracts finally means something. VCA registration becomes provable instead of reconstructable. Syntess keeps calculatie, inkoop and the administratie.
An illustrative scenario based on how work in this sector is typically organised, not a specific client.
Questions from this sector
We would not replace it. Calculatie, inkoop and the financial administration belong in the ERP and should stay there. Custom work lives at the edges: the buitendienst, the portal your client demands, the report in your client's own format, and the koppelingen that have no standard connector. And if you have eight monteurs, Simple Simon or OutSmart is the right answer and we will tell you so.
Fair objection. From the branch's own figures: 20% of employees are insufficiently equipped for the work in terms of qualification and experience, and outflow hit 23,100 people in 2024, the highest ever. An app that adds a step gets rejected, correctly. The design test is whether the monteur does less than before: one entry instead of two, no evening trip to the office. Offline is not a nice-to-have. Roll out with one ploeg, and not in the peak season.
Because what is left is different work. Registered solar installations fell from 298,100 in 2024 to 159,955 in 2025, a drop of 46 percent, and the number of zonnepaneelinstallateurs went from 3,293 to 2,748 across seven consecutive quarters, down 17 percent. Residential heat pump installations fell 35 percent in 2024, roughly 51,000 fewer. The firms still standing sell advice rather than panels: eigen verbruik, thuisbatterij, slim sturen, with a maintenance contract behind it. That needs scenario calculation, an offerte a customer can follow, and monitoring afterwards. Installatieproductievolume is forecast at plus 2.4 percent for 2026. The work did not vanish, it moved.
That is the argument for it, not against it. Three woningcorporaties means three portals, three report formats and three status vocabularies, and the thing translating between them today is your werkvoorbereider. Record the work once, in your own structure, then render it out in whatever each client demands: their portal where there is an API, a structured inbox where there is not, DICO SALES005 to the hoofdaannemer, Peppol to the public client. You keep the data. They keep their format.
Related sectors
Manufacturing
Between your ERP and the shop floor: digital job tickets, machine data, nacalculatie per order. Hours that are in Ridder iQ, Isah or MKG the same day, and a margin per order the DGA sees for the first time.
Logistics & Transport
We build beside your TMS, not over it: koppelingen, cost per rit including the vrachtwagenheffing, a chauffeursapp that needs no training, and a portal that stops the status calls.
Wholesale & Distribution
Ordering portals that read live customer prices and stock straight from Exact or Business Central, plus the 2BA and GS1 data behind them. For a sales desk that cannot hire.
Describe how the work flows now, including the parts held together by spreadsheets. We will tell you what is worth building and what is not.
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