Guide
How to digitize a developer's inventory
Digitizing inventory means turning a developer's unit schedules, masterplans and payment plans into one record per home that every system reads. The work is 20% software and 80% deciding what a unit is, who owns each field, and which existing document wins when two disagree.
The sequence that works
- 01
Fix the unit code
One stable identifier per home, unique across phases, matching between the CRM, the ERP and the masterplan. Duplicate or reused codes are the single most common blocker, and everything downstream depends on resolving them first.
- 02
Agree the area definition
Built-up, net, and built-up including common area are different numbers. Pick one for pricing, record the others as separate fields, and never let a project quietly use a different basis.
- 03
Declare a field owner
For each field — price, availability, delivery date — name the system that owns it. Two owners means two truths, and the disagreement will surface in front of a client.
- 04
Digitize the masterplan
Trace districts, phases, buildings and units as addressable geometry keyed to the unit code, so the map reads records rather than storing its own copy.
- 05
Load payment plans as rules
A payment plan is eligibility rules plus a schedule, not a PDF. Encoding it as rules is what makes one-click offers correct by construction.
- 06
Migrate and reconcile
Load the records, then reconcile unit counts and contracted values against finance before anyone sells on the new system.
What to fix before you start
Duplicate unit codes, phases that exist under two names, and payment plans that live only in a salesperson's memory. None of these are software problems and all of them will stop a migration.
The useful test: ask two people in different departments for the current price and availability of one specific unit. The size of the gap between their answers is the size of the digitization job.
How long it takes
With a clean unit list and a vector masterplan, a project goes live in days. The longest onboarding in Sakneen's implementation record is 14 days from signature. Where unit codes are inconsistent, the calendar is set by how quickly the developer can decide, not by the tooling.
Frequently asked questions
- Should we clean our data before starting?
- Resolve duplicate unit codes first; leave the rest. Sakneen maps existing data during onboarding, and a cleanup project run in advance usually delays the work without improving the outcome.
- Who should own this internally?
- Someone with authority over both sales and commercial data. The decisions are definitional — what a unit is, whose price wins — and they cannot be delegated to whoever holds the spreadsheet.
Related
See it against your own inventory
Bring one project. We load its masterplan and unit list, and you see your own homes as digital records before you decide anything.