Real estate ERP: one system from land to handover.

01Why generic ERPs struggle with developers

Most ERPs are accounting systems that grew outwards. That works for a factory. A real estate developer is different. Land deals take months of inspection, feasibility checks and legal work before a rupee of construction is spent. Marketing money is spent per project and has to be traced to leads. Sales runs on WhatsApp and phone calls, at high volume. Construction needs BOQs, materials and vendors. And a large part of the team works in the field, not at a desk.

Put those on separate tools and every hand-off between departments becomes a spreadsheet, a phone call or a WhatsApp forward. That is where approvals stall and money leaks.

02What MMS covers

MMS is the platform we built for Manju Groups. It now runs most of the company, organised around the life of a project:

Land

A land procurement workflow that follows a property from identification through inspection, feasibility and its approvals, an authorised meeting, legal clearance, MOU agreement, design, statutory approvals and pre-launch. Every step has an owner, documents and a status leadership can see.

Marketing

Project marketing budgets, campaign spend requests with approvals and attachments, actual spend imported from ad platforms or entered from invoices, and cost per lead by campaign, with unmapped spend and leads called out instead of hidden.

Sales and post-sales

Leads from every source, WhatsApp follow-ups, telecalling through Airix, site visits, bookings, receipts, registration documents and post-sales service.

Projects and procurement

Projects and BOQs, materials, purchase orders, vendors, equipment and fleet.

People

HR, attendance, payroll, manpower and labour, team schedules, and GeoTrack, native apps that track field staff during work hours. We wrote about it in field staff tracking done fairly.

Control

A workflow inbox for approvals, tasks, complaints and front desk, audit logs, permissions down to individual actions, and live camera monitoring across sites.

03How it is built

The web app runs on Next.js. The backend is Convex, a real-time database, so dashboards and approval inboxes update the moment something changes, without anyone pressing refresh. People sign in with their phone number and a one-time code, and every screen and action is gated by role-based permissions. Field tracking runs on native Kotlin and Swift apps. A Go service handles the WhatsApp platform, and a small Python service streams site cameras to the browser over WebRTC. It all runs on the group's own servers, because the data is theirs.

04Six lessons from building it

1. Model the approvals first. Who requests, who approves, what happens when they don't. Most of the value of an ERP is in making these visible.
2. Name things once. We keep a shared glossary: planned spend and actual spend are different words for different things, everywhere. Arguments about numbers usually turn out to be arguments about words.
3. Ship one department at a time. Sales went first, because slow follow-ups were costing the most. Each module after that plugged into what already existed.
4. Live data beats reports. When a manager can see today's numbers, the weekly report meeting gets shorter, or disappears.
5. Permissions from day one. Payroll, land deals and vendor rates are sensitive. Adding access control later is far harder than designing it in.
6. Own the infrastructure when the data is sensitive. Running on the company's own servers was a deliberate choice, and it shaped the stack.

05Custom ERP or off-the-shelf?

If your process looks like everyone else's, an off-the-shelf ERP with the right modules will get you running sooner. Custom ERP development pays back when your process is your advantage, when several departments need to work as one, when you have field teams, or when you want to own your data and roadmap. A middle path also works well: keep accounting in the system your auditors know, and build the operational layer around it. More on that trade-off in custom or off-the-shelf.

06Questions people ask