Project · March 2023 to present
L Fusion
My family's IT and ELV systems integration business. I work on the operations side alongside school: costing, invoicing and records.
What the business does
L Fusion designs and installs the systems a building needs beyond its main electrical supply: CCTV, fire detection and suppression, networking, racks, online UPS and precision air-conditioning for server rooms. Most of its projects are for hotels and hospitals. It is a partner for Honeywell and CommScope.
What I do
Every project starts with a bill of quantities, or BOQ: a line-by-line list of every camera, cable, rack and hour of labour the job needs, with a price against each. I prepare BOQs and invoices, keep records in Tally and Excel, worked on the company brochure, and use AI tools to speed up documentation.
A wrong line in a BOQ costs either the client or the company, and the records have to match afterwards.
What I took from it
How much of a business is careful paperwork, and how costing a project actually works: a quote has to be low enough to win the job and high enough to survive it. I also got fluent in Tally and Excel.
It also came back in an unexpected place. When Leo Xtreme was being called a scam, it was L Fusion's name, and its thirty years in Siliguri, that got players to sign up. I wrote about why in my essay on signalling.