Accrual
An accrual is cost that has been incurred on site but not yet invoiced — work that has happened, payment that has not.
Accruals matter because a project's real cost-to-date is always higher than the invoiced cost. Without an accrual position the monthly cost report understates spend and overstates margin.
Example: An engaged contractor has worked 80 hours this month but has not yet submitted a claim. Those 80 hours sit as an accrual against the project until the claim is received and certified.
Back charge
A back charge is a deduction the engaging party takes from an engaged contractor's payment claim to recover the cost of fixing the engaged contractor's breach.
Back charges are gated by the contract: most upward contracts require notice in writing within a set window, otherwise the right to back-charge is waived. Missing the gate is how the engaging party loses recoverable cost.
Example: An engaged contractor leaves the site uncleared. The party engaging them hires a cleaner for $1,400 and back-charges that amount against the engaged contractor's next progress claim.
Baseline (program)
A baseline is an immutable snapshot of the program taken at a point in time, used to measure slippage as the live schedule moves against it.
Once captured, a baseline doesn't change. The variance between baseline and live dates is the slippage — and on a cost-loaded program, slippage has a dollar consequence.
BoQ (Bill of Quantities)
A Bill of Quantities is an itemised list of every measurable work item in a project, with the quantity, unit, rate and total — typically prepared by a quantity surveyor at tender.
BoQ contracts price work item by item, so claims are made by re-measuring the actual quantity completed against the BoQ line. This is different from a Lump Sum contract, where the price is fixed and progress is claimed as a percentage.
Budget line
A budget line is a single costed item in a project's budget, tagged to a trade and a cost type, carrying five values: budgeted, committed, actual, forecast at complete and variance.
Budget lines form a hierarchy — container lines sum their children. Every docket, PO and diary cost line rolls up to a budget line by cost code, which is how cost-to-date stays current without re-keying. Line-level variance here is the under/over-run on that one line — distinct from project margin, which is revenue earned minus cost incurred across the whole job.
Committed cost
Committed cost is money the project is contractually obligated to spend but hasn't yet — typically the value of awarded subcontracts and raised purchase orders not yet claimed or invoiced.
Committed cost is the gap between the budget and the actual that's already spoken for. Tracking it is how you see an overrun coming before the invoices land.
Cost code
A cost code is the budget-side identifier every docket, purchase order and supplier invoice gets tagged with so the cost rolls up against the right budget line.
Cost codes are the glue between the dockets coming in from the site and the budget rolling up on the cost report. A docket without a cost code is unbookable; a budget line without dockets feeding it does not move.
Cost Plus
A cost-plus contract pays the contractor's actual cost plus an agreed margin (a percentage or a fixed fee), rather than a pre-agreed price.
Cost plus is the contract type where cost capture is the revenue mechanism — every claimable dollar traces to a docket, PO or approved claim.
Cost-loaded program
A cost-loaded program is a schedule whose activities carry the budget they will spend, so cost is distributed across time as planned value rather than sitting in a flat budget.
Cost-loading is what lets a schedule delay become a margin signal. As progress is recorded against the activities, earned value accrues and the forecast at complete recomputes.
CPM (Critical Path Method)
CPM is the scheduling technique that calculates the longest chain of dependent activities through a project — the critical path — to find the shortest possible duration and the float on everything else.
tectm runs a full CPM engine (forward and backward pass, FS/SS/FF/SF dependencies with lags, constraints, float) and renders it as an interactive Gantt that shares the budget's data.
Docket
A docket is a daily record of the labour, plant and materials that went into a piece of work on site, captured by the people who did the work.
Dockets are the evidence layer underneath every payment claim, every variation, every cost report. If the docket is wrong, every downstream number is wrong.
Example: A carpentry crew of three works 9 hours on framing, with one tower scaffold on site for the day. The leading hand submits a docket that night listing the three labour entries, the scaffold, and the cost code "1-200 Framing".
Downward contract
A downward contract is one where you are paying the counterparty — the engaged contractor — and money flows out. In traditional construction terminology this was called a "subcontract".
On tectm every downward contract requires an engaged-contractor organisation row. The organisation may be a stub (typed-in name, no tectm account) or fully linked. The same party that is your engaged contractor on one project may be your client on a different one.
EAC (Estimate at Completion)
The estimate at completion is the projected final cost of a project or budget line, given how it's performing to date.
tectm forecasts cost-loaded lines off earned-value performance (actual cost plus remaining work adjusted by the cost performance index); un-loaded lines fall back to actual-plus-remaining-budget. It's the "forecast" in the five values on every budget line.
Earned Value (EVM)
Earned Value Management is a method that compares the value of work actually completed against what was planned and what it cost, to measure schedule and cost performance objectively.
EVM turns "are we on track?" into two ratios — SPI (schedule) and CPI (cost) — and a forecast (EAC). tectm computes them from the cost-loaded program and the site diary.
Engaged contractor
The party you hire under a downward contract — money flows out to them. In traditional construction terminology this was called a "subcontractor".
On tectm, an engaged contractor is just another organisation that happens to sit on the downward side of one of your contracts. The same organisation can be your engaged contractor on this project and your client on one of theirs.
Float
Float is the amount of time an activity can slip without delaying the project (total float) or the next activity (free float).
Activities with zero float are on the critical path. Float is where a program has give — and where a delay is recoverable before it costs anything.
Internal rate card
An internal rate card is an organisation's own labour and plant cost rates — what the work costs you, distinct from what you charge or get charged under a contract.
Internal rate cards are the most sensitive data on the platform: they're row-level-security-scoped to the owning org and never returned to the parties above or engaged contractors below. They drive the cost side of every docket.
Lump Sum
A lump-sum contract fixes a single agreed price for a defined scope; progress is claimed as a percentage of the whole, not re-measured item by item.
Lump sum trades certainty of price for rigidity of scope — every change has to flow through a variation.
Payment certificate
A payment certificate is the engaging party's formal written response to an engaged contractor's payment claim, stating the amount they agree to pay and the reasons for any disputed amount.
Under the Security of Payment Act, payment certificates have a strict statutory window. Issue late or fail to issue and the claim is taken to be approved in full — even amounts the engaging party disputes.
Payment claim
A payment claim is an engaged contractor's formal request for payment for work completed up to a reference date, made under the Security of Payment Act.
Payment claims trigger statutory response windows for the engaging party. The claim must be substantiated — without dockets, invoices or variation approvals behind it, the claim is fragile in adjudication.
Projected margin
Projected margin is forecast revenue minus forecast cost at completion — what the project is on track to make, not just what it's made so far.
Because tectm holds revenue and cost on one cost-coded spine, projected margin updates live as claims certify, diary cost finalises and the program's earned-value forecast moves.
Purchase order (PO)
A purchase order is a contractual commitment to buy goods or services at an agreed price, raised against a supplier and tagged to a cost code.
POs feed the committed-cost leg of the budget; when the goods are received and invoiced, the commitment converts to actual cost on the same budget line.
Retention
Retention is a percentage of each payment claim that the engaging party holds back as security for defect rectification and contractual performance, typically released at practical completion and end of defects-liability period.
Retention is governed by the contract — usually 5% up to a cap of 5% of the total contract value, with half released at practical completion and half at the end of the defects period. Mis-tracking retention is a common source of disputes at project close.
RLS (Row-Level Security)
Row-Level Security is the database-layer access control tectm uses to ensure that cost data, internal rate cards and internal-only fields are never visible to engaged contractors below or the parties above, even if they share the same database.
RLS runs at the Postgres layer, not the application layer — so a misconfigured frontend cannot leak data the database has already refused to return. Every API request resolves the user's role and Postgres returns only the rows that role is authorised to see.
Site diary
A site diary is the head contractor's own daily record of a project — own-forces labour, plant and materials, plus the day's events — kept separately from the dockets submitted by engaged contractors.
In tectm the diary is a confidential, first-class cost record. The day runs on two tracks — own-forces work and engaged-contractor dockets — each closing independently; finalised diary cost lines feed the budget actuals.
SoPA (Security of Payment Act)
The Security of Payment Act is state-level legislation in every Australian jurisdiction that sets the timeframes and process for payment claims, payment certificates, and rapid adjudication if payment is disputed.
Each state's Act differs in the detail but the structure is the same — claim within a window, certify within a window, adjudicate quickly if disputed. Missing the windows is how recoverable claims become irrecoverable.
SoR (Schedule of Rates)
A Schedule of Rates is the agreed unit price list for every common work type in a contract — labour classifications, plant items, materials — used to price ad-hoc or measured work without re-tendering.
SoR contracts price work after the fact by multiplying measured quantity by agreed rate. They suit projects where the scope is uncertain but the work types are predictable, like maintenance, civil, and demolition packages.
Substantiation packet
A substantiation packet is the bundle of evidence — dockets, payment certificates, signed variations, supplier invoices, photos — that proves every line on a payment claim is real and contractually owed.
A claim without a substantiation packet is fragile in adjudication. tectm generates the packet on demand from the records already in the system, so substantiation takes minutes instead of days.
Tectus
Tectus is tectm's contract-review engine — it reads each uploaded contract on ingest, extracts the rates, retention, milestones and risk clauses with per-field confidence and source-clause citations, and indexes the document.
The contract-review extraction is live today; the cited conversational Q&A assistant that will sit on the indexed contracts is coming next. Engaged contractors using the platform are restricted by RLS to the contracts they have a right to read.
Upward contract
An upward contract is one where the counterparty is paying you — they are the client — and money flows in. In traditional construction terminology this was often called a "head contract".
tectm is symmetric: every organisation can sit on either side of any contract. The same business can hold upward contracts (where they are the engaged party) on some projects and downward contracts (where they engage others) on others. Direction is a per-contract property, not an org-wide one.
Variation
A variation is any change to the scope, time or price of the contract — additional work, an omission, a time extension, a rate change, or a provisional-sum adjustment — that needs to be agreed and documented to keep the contract intact.
Variations are where margin slips silently. A verbal yes on site without paperwork is a variation that cannot be claimed; a missed time extension is a missed defence against liquidated damages.
