About us: By builders for builders
My wife Malene and I – Christian – built our own house in our early 30s. The distribution of roles was relatively clear: Malene had a much better sense of how to make us feel at home and already paid attention during the floor plan design phase to where which sideboard would fit best and how our lives would probably play out later in the house. Today, some six years later, we can say that she was right, of course 🙂
I, on the other hand, am responsible for organizational matters and keep an eye on “the big picture”. That’s why I was also responsible for organizing the house construction, coordinating with the trades and answering “there’s a problem” calls.
And this is precisely where POCASIO originated. After all, it quickly takes 1.5 to 2 years from the first thought of owning your own home to the handover of the keys. And over time, you also use more and more tools to organize yourself accordingly. At least that’s how I felt. On a whim, at some point I thought “Why isn’t there anything specifically aimed at builders?” and wrote the first concept for POCASIO.
To help you understand the thinking behind the functions of POCASIO, I’ll take you on a tour of our house in the following lines.
Excel makes the start…
Back then, we started by defining a rough framework in the first place. How much money do we have and how much house can we afford? This Excel list was then expanded at some point to include our financing concept and finally became a complete cost overview.
Because we had the same experience as probably many others: We paid the first 5, 6, 7 bills and the first time we asked what the current status of the individual loans was.
We have therefore stored all loans in the “final” Excel file and assigned each expense to one of these loans. This was the only way we could keep an overview at the end and know which loan amounts we had already drawn down and what was still available. This also helped us to be a little more “strategic” with new invoices and to look at which money we should use to pay these invoices in order to have all our loans paid off properly later on.
And this is exactly how the POCASIO cost overview is organized today.
Too many tools for one project
While I was building the house, I realized that I needed various tools to keep everything neatly organized. For example, I was constantly checking my emails for the contractor list to step on the toes of some trade or clarify things.
Then there are the various to-dos that arise during construction: Having contracts checked, choosing a washbasin or asking the site manager about the scratch on the window frame – you don’t want to forget anything.
And while we’re on the subject: Remedying defects… Our construction went quite well overall. And yet, of course, there are defects that are repeatedly reported during the construction phase. And after the house was handed over, we had to get down to the nitty-gritty again, we must have sent 20 emails with defects to the developer. Mostly nothing dramatic, but we still lost track of things. How often I went through the e-mails to check which defect had been rectified and which was still open…
POCASIO is specially designed for builders
As I mentioned at the beginning, at some point I put our experiences of building a house down on paper and kept thinking “We should do that”. And less than three years later, the concept has already been implemented 😉
We are delighted that the first version of POCASIO went online in March 2022. Is the software already perfect? Probably not. But it is a first start on how you can organize your house construction digitally. And if you have any ideas, feedback or suggestions for further functions, please write to us! Maybe we can work together to develop the best software for future builders and builders’ wives!