Indonesia is building data centres at a pace the country has never attempted before. As of late 2025, the market counted 88 existing facilities with 25 more on the way across 17 cities, including 38 existing and 13 upcoming facilities in Jakarta alone. Each project is a capital-intensive, multi-year undertaking involving dozens of parties and unforgiving deadlines. The industry has become expert at the engineering. Project accounting, the financial discipline that keeps those builds honest, has lagged behind.
Why data centre projects are financially hard
Three structural features make data centre delivery a project management problem before it is a construction problem:
Multi-phase delivery
A facility moves through design, build, and operate phases, each with different cost profiles, teams, and risks. Costs committed in design are spent in build and recovered in operation, so a financial view that resets at each phase boundary hides exactly the connections that matter.
Multiple contractors and stakeholders
Engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractors, mechanical and electrical specialists, equipment vendors, utility providers and anchor tenants all interact on one critical path. Every subcontract, variation order, and progress claim is a financial event that must hit the project ledger as it happens, or the reported position drifts from reality.
Strict timelines and SLAs
Anchor tenants sign for capacity on dates. Miss them, and penalties accrue while revenue slips. Schedule risk and financial risk are the same risk wearing different clothes.
The base rates should worry every operator
Large capital projects fail financially far more often than headline announcements suggest. McKinsey research estimates that 98% of megaprojects suffer cost overruns of more than 30 percent, and 77% are at least 40% late. A separate McKinsey analysis of more than 500 projects found average cost overruns of at least 79% against initial budgets, with delays averaging 52%. Most tellingly, a study of 48 troubled megaprojects attributed 73% of cost and time overruns to poor execution, with external forces accounting for the remainder. Execution problems are visibility problems: by the time an overrun appears in a quarterly review, the money is gone.
What project accounting changes
Project accounting embeds the financial view inside the project as it runs, rather than reconstructing it after the fact. Implemented on a cloud ERP such as NetSuite, it delivers three capabilities:
- Real-time project costing. Every commitment, invoice, and variation posts against the project structure as it occurs, so budget versus actual is a live number, phase by phase and work package by work package. Overruns surface in days, while corrective action is still cheap.
- Resource management. People, equipment and subcontractor capacity are planned and tracked against the same project structure, exposing the resource conflicts and idle costs that quietly inflate budgets across concurrent builds.
- Project accounting discipline. Milestone billing, retention, progress claims, and phase-level profitability all run in one ledger, giving management and investors a single trusted view from groundbreaking to handover, and a clean financial baseline for the operating phase that follows.
Our approach
PS Global implements NetSuite project accounting for data centre operators, developers and contractors across Southeast Asia, configuring project structures that mirror how facilities are actually delivered: by phase, by contractor and by SLA commitment. As a multi-year winner of NetSuite’s ASEAN Partner of the Year award, we have spent 18 years helping capital-intensive businesses in the region keep complex delivery financially visible.
The data centre boom will reward the operators who know their true project position every single day. Speak to our team about putting real-time project control behind your build programme.
