ERPNext for Bangladesh Real Estate: Dhaka Skyline Properties & Construction Ltd.

🏙️ Company Profile Recap

Dhaka Skyline Properties & Construction Ltd. is the fictional Dhaka-based developer used throughout this companion series, first introduced in Part 1's company profiles. It combines land acquisition, real estate development, and in-house construction under one roof — the same shape as many real Dhaka-market developers, but every project, unit, and figure in this article is illustrative only.

Part 1's six-question training framework (WHO/WHAT/WHY/WHEN/WHERE/HOW) and its Configure/Customize/Custom-Module/Integration decision tree apply here unchanged — this article reuses those patterns rather than re-deriving them, and focuses on how they play out specifically for a property developer running construction alongside sales.

🔄 The Project Lifecycle

Every apartment project this company runs follows the same backbone, from raw land to a handed-over unit generating no further transactions:

Note that sales can start well before construction finishes — bookings and installment collection typically run in parallel with the Procurement/Construction/Progress stages, which is exactly why the sales side needs its own custom module rather than waiting for Handover to touch ERPNext at all (see Custom Module B below).

🧩 How Real Estate Operations Use Existing ERPNext Modules

Before adding anything custom, most of the day-to-day transaction volume in this company already fits standard ERPNext modules — this is the "Configure" and "Customize" rungs of Part 1's decision tree, exhausted first:

For the base-side mechanics behind the Buying, Stock, and Projects rows, see the Buying module workflow, the Stock module workflow, and the Projects module workflow from the core 9-part course.

🏗️ Custom Module A: Property & Project Management

None of Project, Building, Floor, Unit, or Apartment as a saleable, trackable inventory concept exists as a standard ERPNext DocType — this is squarely the "need new DocTypes, deep integration" end of the customization decision tree, so it becomes a custom module rather than a stack of Custom Fields.

Related DocTypes hang off this chain: Unit Type (e.g. 3 Bedroom, 2 Bedroom, Duplex), Unit Status (Available, Booked, Sold, Handed Over), and Property Feature (balcony, parking, view) — all designed as simple lookup/Select-backed DocTypes that keep the Unit record itself lean.

A worked, entirely fictional example — not a real development, just an illustration of how the hierarchy nests:

Using Part 1's exact field-level training table shape (Field | Type | Required? | Who enters? | When? | Why? | Example | Related DocType), here is the illustrative Unit DocType:

💳 Custom Module B: Property Sales & Installment Management

Just as the hospital case study's Lab Request/Sample chain models a clinical process, this project's Booking/Installment chain models the sales-and-collection process specific to real estate — a domain ERPNext's standard Selling module doesn't natively express as a multi-year payment schedule.

A related Cancellation DocType handles the (common, in real estate) case where a booking is reversed and the unit needs to flow back to Available status with any refund logic handled explicitly rather than silently.

As a day-to-day workflow rather than a DocType chain, the same process reads:

🧱 Construction Management

Construction execution gets its own cluster of custom DocTypes, separate from the sales-facing module above:

🔗 Custom Property Module ↔ ERPNext Core

Like every custom module in this series, the property module is only useful because it links back into ERPNext core rather than duplicating it:

📦 Construction Procurement

For the base-side mechanics of Material Request through Purchase Invoice, see the Buying module workflow from the core course — this section only adds the construction-specific tail (site transfer and activity-level consumption) on top of it.

📐 BOQ & Cost Control

The Bill of Quantities (BOQ) is the backbone of construction cost control: it estimates, up front, exactly how much of each material and labor category a project needs, at what rate, giving a baseline that actuals get compared against continuously rather than only at project close.

💰 Apartment Sales & Accounting

The custom property documents connect into ERPNext's financial core the same way any custom sales flow should: a Booking references a Customer record (not a bespoke buyer table), the underlying obligation is expressed through a standard Sales Order/Sales Invoice, each installment collected is a standard Payment Entry allocated against that invoice, every posting lands in the same Account structure as any other sale, and the whole thing rolls up under the relevant Project for cost/profitability reporting.

Crucially, at no point does the custom module store its own "amount still owed" field as the source of truth — it derives it. This depends directly on the principle covered in Invoice vs Payment: the document lifecycle: outstanding balance is always derived from invoice minus allocated payments, never stored and hand-maintained, precisely because an installment plan can span years and dozens of partial payments where a stale stored balance would silently drift from reality.

🧾 Bangladesh VAT/Tax for Real Estate & Construction

Real estate and construction sit under several distinct tax touchpoints in Bangladesh's VAT/tax regime — property sales, construction services, supplier-side VAT on materials, contractor invoices, and advance payments can each attract different treatment. This section describes the concepts an ERPNext configuration needs to model, not the actual current rates.

Every percentage that could appear in a real configuration (property VAT rate, construction service rate, supplier VAT rate, withholding rate) is an example/configuration placeholder only — no rate is stated as real or current anywhere in this article. This reuses the exact framing established in Part 1's Bangladesh Context section, which this article inherits rather than repeats.

👥 Real Estate Role/Permission Matrix

Exact read/write/create/submit/cancel permissions per role, and any record-level restriction (e.g. a Site Engineer limited to one Project), are configured the standard ERPNext way — through the Role Permission Manager — rather than hard-coded in this custom module's controllers.

📝 Property Booking Workflow

📊 Real Estate Dashboards

Management

• Total Projects
• Units Available
• Units Sold
• Booking Value
• Collection
• Outstanding
• Construction Cost
• Budget Variance
• Project Progress
• Profitability

Project Manager

• Tasks
• BOQ
• Material consumption
• Site progress
• Contractor progress
• Cost variance

Sales Manager

• Leads
• Site Visits
• Bookings
• Conversion
• Collection

🏁 End-to-End Real Estate Workflow

Reading this chain left to right by origin: Opportunity, Quotation, and Payment are Base ERPNext documents running unmodified; Property Unit Selection, Booking, Installment, and Construction Progress are Custom Module documents built specifically for this company. Neither side works in isolation — every custom step ultimately links back to a Customer, Item, Project, or Account so the two halves stay one coherent system rather than two disconnected apps.

🔍 Real-World Troubleshooting Scenarios

Scenario 1: "Apartment is showing available after booking"

Scenario 2: "Project cost exceeds budget"

🔒 Real Estate Data Security

Note: this article uses only fictional sample data — no real customer, project, or financial information appears anywhere in this series.

✅ Real Estate UAT Checklist

• Lead capture — a new inquiry correctly creates a Lead/Opportunity and is assigned to a Sales Executive
• Unit availability — the Unit list correctly reflects Available/Booked/Sold/Handed Over status at every stage
• Booking — a booking correctly moves through Draft → Confirmed and updates unit status accordingly
• Installment schedule/payment — a schedule generates correctly from the agreed plan, and payments allocate against it correctly
• Procurement — Material Request through Purchase Invoice runs correctly for a construction material
• Stock/material consumption — site transfer and consumption correctly reduce stock and post against the right Construction Activity
• Project cost tracking — BOQ estimated vs actual cost and variance calculate correctly
• Payment — customer and supplier/contractor payments post to the correct accounts
• Handover — the final handover step correctly closes out the unit's sales and construction records

🗺️ What's Next

This article is Part 3 of the 4-part ERPNext Bangladesh Implementation Case Study series. For the company profile, training framework, and customization decision tree this article builds on, see Part 1: Implementation Methodology. For a parallel case study applying the same approach to a different domain, see Part 2: Hospital Management — comparing its clinical Lab Request/Sample chain against this project's construction BOQ/Work Package chain is a useful way to see the same custom-module discipline applied twice. For how this project's two custom modules (Property & Project Management, and Property Sales & Installment Management) and its Construction Management app would actually be built, tested, and deployed, continue to Part 4: Custom Development, DevOps & Production.