From the brief to the final sign-off: how a real Ghana build runs on GhanaHousePlanner, week by week. Who logs what from site, how payments get approved, how you see the money before it runs out, and what each plan includes.
Most Ghanaian builds don't fail on the day the foundation is poured. They fail slowly: a payment made for work nobody checked, a delivery that was never counted, a wall built differently from the drawing because the question came by phone and the answer was never written down. By the time the owner notices, the money is gone.
This guide follows one build from the first conversation to the final sign-off, showing exactly what happens on GhanaHousePlanner at each step. Our example owner, Ama, lives in London and is building a four-bedroom storey building in Kasoa. You might be in Kumasi and visiting site every Saturday — the workflow is the same.
If you have no plan yet, open the AI design chat and describe the house. Kwame asks a few questions the way an architect would: who will live in the house, how big the plot is and which side the road is on, one level or a storey building, what your household needs day to day (a dirty kitchen, a study, a bedroom downstairs for a parent). Then it shows you the brief — the rooms on each floor — before designing anything. Every room in the design is checked against the Ghana Building Code (GS 1207): minimum sizes, a window to the outside, a way in from a hall, bathrooms stacked over plumbing below.
If you already have a plan, upload it. The check is free: you see what we read — floors, bedrooms, bathrooms, doors and windows — and a rough cost range before you pay to unlock the redrawn plan.
If you're already building, use Bring Your Build on the My Projects page: enter the house's basics and the stage construction has reached, and you're straight into project tracking — no design step.
Either way you end up with a project, a drawing and a cost estimate measured from that drawing.
Site logs by WhatsApp. Your supervisor sends a photo to our WhatsApp line with a caption — "blockwork up to lintel level, east side" — and it lands in the site log of the right project and phase. A note without a photo starts with LOG: "LOG roof trusses delivered". Nobody has to remember to type it up later.
Material usage. "Used 50 bags of cement today" goes into the material log, so what was delivered can be compared with what was used.
Defects. A crack, a window set at the wrong height, a door that won't close: log it as a defect with photos, assign it, and it stays open until someone fixes it and it's checked.
Questions from site (RFIs). When the contractor needs a decision — a material swap, a dimension the drawing doesn't show — they raise an RFI instead of calling you at 3am. It's assigned to whoever should answer, and the answer is on record. We wrote a whole guide on how RFIs keep remote decisions accountable.
This is where most money is lost, so the workflow is strict on purpose.
Every step is kept in the project's audit trail, so six months later there's no argument about what was paid for what.
Request quotes from verified suppliers on CornerStore. When you accept a quote, it becomes a procurement order inside your project's Procurement tab, so deliveries are tracked against the build rather than in a separate chat.
Budget shows what you've actually spent against your estimate, phase by phase.
Cost Forecast goes further. It compares the money spent with the work actually installed (earned value) to forecast what the whole house will cost at completion — so a 15% overrun shows up at the roofing stage, not at handover. It also shows how much the build needs each month and a 30/60/90-day cash-flow outlook, which matters when the money is coming from abroad.
The weekly digest emails you what needs attention across your projects: phases running late, defects still open, payments waiting for you.
As each phase finishes, your supervisor marks it done, and it can only be verified once there's at least one site photo behind it. The Audit report puts the whole build on record — phases, defects, payments and site photos — as a PDF you can save to the Documents vault, alongside the drawings, permits, receipts and contracts, for the bank, a buyer or your own peace of mind.
Contractors, developers and anyone building several houses can use Pro: a dashboard across every project, projects grouped by client with fees and profitability, portfolio analytics, and unlimited collaborators.
Payments go through Paystack: Mobile Money, card or bank transfer. One payment covers the year, because a build runs for a year or more.
Use our advanced cost calculator to get accurate estimates for your building project in Ghana
The people you hire decide whether your build goes well. Here's exactly how our professional services work — vetted supervisors and contractors, architect review and stamp, land verification and free expert calls — with real fees and what happens at each step.
Your contractor calls about a window height, a material substitution, a wall that doesn't match the drawing — and you're at work, asleep, or a continent away. Here's how a documented RFI trail keeps site decisions accountable instead of lost in a WhatsApp thread.
Foundation laid, walls going up, budget already drifting, no one supervising the site remotely — you don't need to start over. Here's how to bring an in-progress Ghana build onto one platform for the rest of the way.