The Boss Who Couldn’t Answer a Simple Question
We were sitting with the owner of a Belgian interior-building company - 40 years in business, a workshop full of machinery, plenty of work on the books. We asked what should have been an easy question:
“Which of your projects make the most money?”
He couldn’t say. Not because he’s a bad businessman - he’s a very good one. But because the answer was scattered across three Excel exports that had never once been in the same room together. Labor hours in one. Material costs in another. Invoiced totals in the accounting system. None of them agreeing on a project code.
He’s not unusual. This is the default state of almost every project-based business in construction and carpentry. They know they’re profitable overall. They have no idea which projects carry the company and which quietly drain it.
That’s a dangerous way to run a business. So we built Postcalc.
”We’ll Check the Numbers Later”
Every construction and carpentry boss has said it. A project wraps up, something feels off about the margin, and the promise gets made: “I’ll check the numbers later.”
Later means reconciling exports by hand. Pulling labor bookings per worker per day out of one system. Matching purchase invoices from another. Lining those up against what you actually invoiced. Fixing the project codes that don’t match. Guessing at the bookings that landed in the wrong place.
It’s hours of work for a single project. So it gets done for the three biggest jobs of the year, if at all - long after the moment when knowing could have changed anything.
For everything else, you run on gut feel. You quote the next kitchen the way you quoted the last one, because it “felt fine.” You keep taking a certain type of work because you’ve always done it, never noticing it loses money every single time.
The post-calculation - the nacalculatie every accountant nags you about - is the single most useful number in a project business. And almost nobody does it, because doing it by hand is miserable.
The Data Already Exists. That’s the Frustrating Part.
Here’s what makes this solvable: you’re already producing all the data you need.
Your business management software - OneTwo, Geodynamics, Exact Online - already exports it. Labor hours, booked per worker. Purchases and material costs. Sales and invoicing. It’s all there, in Excel, right now.
The problem was never missing data. The problem is that the exports don’t talk to each other:
- Different project codes in each file
- Different date formats
- Labor in one structure, purchases in another, revenue in a third
- Bookings that landed on the wrong project, or no project at all
Reconciling that by hand is the entire reason post-calculation doesn’t happen. Remove that friction, and suddenly every project can have a real profit-and-loss. That’s exactly what we removed.
What Postcalc Actually Does
Postcalc is a platform that takes the Excel exports you already make and turns them into per-project profitability. No new data entry. No replacing your existing systems.
The workflow:
1. Upload your exports. Drop in the Excel files from OneTwo, Geodynamics, or Exact Online. Labor, purchases, sales - whatever your system produces.
2. Postcalc reconciles everything. It parses each file, matches every row to the right project, and normalizes the mismatched codes and date formats. Labor, materials, and revenue finally line up against the same project.
3. Out comes a true profit-and-loss. For every project: revenue, labor cost, material cost, and the real margin in euros and percent. Sorted worst to best, so the money-losers surface first instead of hiding in the average.
4. Anomalies get flagged. A worker who booked 200 hours to an 80-hour quote. A purchase with no matching project. A job invoiced below its own cost. Postcalc surfaces the things that quietly destroy margin, instead of letting them disappear into a yearly total.
5. You drill in. Click into any project, right down to the individual labor booking, and see exactly where the time and money went.
Built With a Real Workshop, Not in a Boardroom
We didn’t design Postcalc from a list of features. We built it alongside De Laere Decor in Wevelgem - an interior-building and custom-furniture company with four decades of total projects behind them.
They had everything a good business should: skilled people, a serious workshop, steady demand. What they didn’t have was a clear view of which projects actually paid. The data lived in exports that never met. So we made those exports answer one question - did this project make money? - for every project, not just the few they had time to check by hand.
That’s our whole approach. We don’t build software for software people. We build it for the boss on the workshop floor, with the messy real-world exports they actually have, to answer the questions they actually ask.
Why ERP Hasn’t Solved This
“But ERP systems do post-calculation,” someone always says. True. They also want a six-figure budget, a year of implementation, and to replace every tool you already own.
For most carpentry and construction businesses, that’s a non-starter. They’re not going to rip out OneTwo or Exact Online and retrain everyone for the sake of one report.
Postcalc starts from the opposite end. It uses what you already have. The exports already exist. You upload them, Postcalc reconciles them, and you get the answer - this week, not next year. No migration, no rip-and-replace, no discovery workshop.
Try It
If you run a construction or carpentry business and you’ve ever said “I’ll check the numbers later” about a project’s margin, Postcalc is for you.
Export last month from your system. Upload it. Watch your projects sort themselves from worst margin to best. The ones that surprise you are exactly the ones you needed to see.
You already have the data. Postcalc just lets you finally read it.
Postcalc is built by glue.blue - the same team behind Konvoi, QueryLoop, and Panelloop. We build AI-powered tools for businesses that actually work.