My father manages two residential construction sites in Bengaluru. Every day, he deals with masons, cement suppliers, plumbers, and government approvals — all tracked in his head or on WhatsApp messages he can never find again.
We built Nirman to fix this. In 2 days. And it works better than any construction app on the Play Store.
The Problem
Construction in India runs on cash and trust. A typical day at site involves 5-10 expense transactions — paying masons their daily wage, buying cement bags, settling vendor bills, paying for JCB rental. Most builders track this on paper, Excel sheets, or not at all.
The existing apps (Powerplay, SiteWise) are built for large contractors. They have procurement workflows, PO approvals, and GST calculations that a residential builder doesn't need. What my father needed was something as simple as a payment app — tap, speak, done.
The Solution: Voice-First, One Form
Nirman has one form. That's it. You tap the mic, say "do hazaar cement Ramesh ko" (two thousand, cement, to Ramesh), and the app auto-fills the amount (2000), category (Materials), subcategory (Cement), and vendor (Ramesh). It understands Hindi, Kannada, and English — even code-mixed, which is how Bengaluru actually speaks.
The voice engine is Sarvam.ai — an Indian AI company that handles multilingual speech-to-text better than Whisper for Indian languages. We parse the transcript with a custom Hindi number parser that handles "do hazaar", "panch sau", "ek lakh" and converts them to digits.
The Tech Stack
We kept it lean:
- Next.js 16 — App Router, server components, Turbopack
- Supabase — Postgres + Auth + Row Level Security
- Sarvam.ai — Hindi/Kannada/English voice STT
- Zustand — lightweight state (custom categories, preferences)
- Tailwind v4 — modern UI with amber gradients
- PWA — installable from browser, no Play Store needed
Multi-Tenant from Day One
Construction is a team sport. The site supervisor, the owner, the accountant — they all need access. We built organization-based multi-tenancy with admin and team roles. The admin (father) invites team members by phone number. They get a default PIN (last 4 digits of their phone) and can start adding entries immediately.
Row Level Security in Supabase ensures each organization only sees their own data. No API middleware needed — the database enforces isolation.
The Vendor Ledger — The Killer Feature
The single most important question in construction: "How much do I owe this vendor?" Every entry with a vendor name builds a running ledger. Credit entries (materials received on credit) vs payments made — the outstanding balance updates in real-time. One tap to share the ledger on WhatsApp.
Results
Nirman is live, used daily across two construction sites. Voice entry takes under 10 seconds. The vendor ledger has already caught a billing discrepancy that would have been missed. And the best part — father installed it from the browser. No Play Store, no updates, no friction.
Open Source
We've open-sourced Nirman on GitHub. If you're building houses in India and want a dead-simple expense tracker, fork it. The schema handles everything Bengaluru construction needs — from BBMP approvals to M-Sand pricing.