A house is the biggest project a family runs
Building a home is a two-year project with a large budget and no software. The family should see the same numbers as the person on site.
For most families, building a house is the largest project they will ever run. It lasts a year or two, the budget is bigger than anything they have spent before, and a dozen different people are paid along the way. It is run almost entirely on cash, phone calls and a notebook.
Why is building a house so hard to keep track of?
Because the money moves on site and the worry lives at home. The owner is there at eight in the morning paying the crew for the week. The steel arrives at noon with a bill that ends up in a pocket. At home, a parent or a partner wants to know how much has gone, and the only way to find out is to call and ask.
Every one of those calls is reasonable, and together they wear a family down. The person on site starts to feel watched. The people at home start to feel shut out. Nobody has done anything wrong, and everyone ends the week tired.
What would help?
The same numbers, in front of everyone, the moment they change. A payment is written down before the crew walks away. The bill is photographed while it is still in hand. The family sees both without having to ask, and the owner knows the same afternoon when the slab has cost more than planned.
That is the whole of Manekatti, and it is live now on phones. It is a small app with a narrow job. Most of the design went into what to leave out, so that writing down a payment takes less time than explaining it on a call.
What did building it teach me?
That the hardest software problems in a family are about trust, and the interface is where trust is either built or lost. A screen that shows every rupee calmly, with no red and no alarms, does more for a household than any feature list. The people at home stop asking because they can already see. The person on site stops explaining because the record does it for them.