Construction cost control software for Australian head contractors

Every construction project has a contract above it and a budget below it. The contract above is the revenue contract: what the client has agreed to pay, on what terms, with what retention held and what liquidated damages attached. The budget below is what you expect to spend delivering it, broken into budget lines by trade and by cost type, each tagged with a cost code.

Margin is the difference between what the job has earned under the contract and what it has cost so far. Cost control is the discipline of knowing that number while the job is running, with enough confidence to act on it: to push a variation before the work is done rather than after, to notice a trade package running hot before its supplier invoices arrive, to claim everything the contract lets you claim.

The accounting system does not do this. It records invoices once they exist. Cost control works one step earlier, on the site records and the commitments that will become those invoices, and on the contract terms that decide what each of them is worth.

On most commercial jobs the cost report comes out two or three weeks after the month closes, and it is already out of date on the day it is issued. Three lags cause it.

Dockets arrive late and get coded later. A docket is the daily record of who worked, what plant ran and what materials went in. On paper it sits in a ute until Friday, then in a tray until someone keys it, and only then does it get a cost code. Until it has one, the cost it represents does not exist anywhere the job can see it.

Cost is incurred long before it is invoiced. Concrete poured in week two is invoiced in week six. The gap is an accrual, and if nobody estimates it the cost report understates spend and overstates margin every month. Most teams accrue by hand, from memory, at month end.

Scope changes have no record. A verbal yes on site is a variation that cannot be claimed. A missed time extension is a missed defence against liquidated damages. Neither shows up in a cost report because neither was ever written down.

A faster report does not fix any of these. Capturing each record once, at the point it happens, with its cost code attached, does.

The commercial workflow a head contractor already runs is also the evidence chain for the margin number. It has four steps, and each one substantiates the next.

1. Docket. The crew records the labour, plant and materials that went into a piece of work, on the day, against a cost code. An engaged contractor submits theirs; your own forces go in the site diary.
2. Assess. The contract administrator checks each docket against the contract: the right classification, the right rate for that date under the schedule of rates, hours that match the diary. Approve, reprice or reject.
3. Claim. Approved dockets are priced into the period's payment claim under the Security of Payment Act, against a reference date that starts the statutory clock. Work outside the original scope goes through a variation, with its own approval, before it can be claimed.
4. Certificate. The other party responds with a payment certificate stating what they will pay and why any amount is disputed. Issued late, the claim is taken to be approved in full. Retention is held on the certified amount and released at practical completion and at the end of the defects period.

Run on paper, each step is a re-keying of the one before it, and the substantiation packet for a disputed claim takes days to assemble. Run as one record that moves through four states, the claim is the sum of its approved dockets and the packet already exists.

Whatever tool you use for this, the requirements are set by the workflow above, and a tool that skips any of them leaves the margin number where it was.

• One cost-coded spine. Revenue and cost on the same cost codes, so a docket, a purchase order and a claim line all roll up to the same budget line without a mapping sheet in between.
• Capture at the source. The docket is created by the people who did the work, on the day, from wherever they are. A docket keyed from paper a week later is a week of lag built in.
• Rates that know the date. A labour classification is worth a different amount after an award increase or a contract rate revision. Pricing a docket means pricing it at the rate that applied on the day the work was done.
• A forecast that comes from the plan. Cost to complete is the remaining work on the program at its budgeted cost, so a slip on the critical path changes the forecast that day. A cost-loaded program is how a schedule delay becomes a margin signal.
• Your internal rates stay yours. What the work costs you is the most sensitive number on the job. The internal rate card must be invisible to the parties above you and the contractors below you, enforced by the system rather than by who remembers to hide a column.
• Australian by default. State-by-state Security of Payment timeframes, the public holiday calendar of the state the project is in, GST on claims and certificates, and the vocabulary used on commercial work here.

tectm is construction cost control software built around that workflow for Australian head contractors. The head contract and the subcontracts sit on one cost-coded spine. Dockets come in from the site, including from a phone, and are assessed against date-effective contract rates. Approved dockets price into payment claims; certificates, retention, back charges and liquidated damages sit on the revenue side of the same job. A cost-loaded critical-path program carries the forecast, and projected margin is what the revenue loading nets against the cost loading, per cost code, today.

Contracts are read on upload by Tectus, which extracts the rates, retention terms and milestone dates with the clause and page each one came from, and answers questions about them the same way. Substantiation packets are generated on demand from the records already in the system. Internal rate cards are locked to the organisation that owns them at the database itself.

It runs on the desktop today, with dockets and the site diary also on the phone. It is not a document store, not a compliance checklist and not built for residential work. Access is by invitation: there is no public sign-up, and the first step is a conversation about one of your projects.