Construction and Trades
Quotes, site records and handover documents live in email because the work happens somewhere the systems are not. We build capture that fits a site and a job record that everything else attaches to.
What it costs today
Every one of these is a place where somebody knew something and it never reached a system that could act on it. Six patterns turn up in almost every contracting business we map.
Nobody filled in the daily report on Tuesday because they were on site. By Friday the person writing it up is reconstructing four days from camera timestamps and memory.
A site record that is thinnest exactly where a dispute will land.What was priced, what was ordered and what was billed each live in their own file, and the differences between them surface at the valuation rather than at the point somebody could have asked about it.
Variations you delivered and never charged for.The supplier emailed a new date, somebody read it, and the three work items waiting on it kept their old dates because updating them meant walking the programme by hand.
A completion date that moves without anyone deciding it should.Certificates, warranties, test results and as-built information were all produced during the job and none of them were filed against anything. Somebody now spends three weeks finding them again.
Retention held while the paperwork is rebuilt.Who is on site, what they have completed, what they are waiting on and what they have claimed for lives across a programme, a WhatsApp thread and somebody knowing.
Two trades booked into the same space on the same morning.FMI and PlanGrid surveyed nearly 600 construction professionals and found around 14 hours a week going to looking for project information, resolving conflicts and dealing with mistakes and rework.
A third of the week spent finding out what already happened.The operating pattern
Controlled delegation is the whole design, and everything below this band is an application of it. The work of recording and working out goes to the system. What the client is told, what gets claimed and which job a cost belongs to goes to a person.
A delivery arrives, a trade finishes a section, a supplier moves a date, an inspection passes. All of it is known by somebody standing on a site, and none of it is anywhere yet.
Turning what was said into a report, filing photographs against the work they show, matching a delivery to its order, and walking the programme to see what a slipped date moves. None of it is judgment.
What the client is told, what gets claimed, which job a cost belongs to and whether a delay is recoverable. These reach a named person with the working already done.
See it run
A voice note, three photos and a delivery slip go in. The daily log, the programme consequence and the cost record come out, and anything the client would see waits for a person.
Connected systems
Site update Kingsmead Phase 2 Block C, Thursday
Result
Completed automatically
Requires a person
Signing off the day record.
Project manager
Connected systems
Site update Ravensgate Retail Unit 4, Tuesday
Result
Completed automatically
Requires a person
The supplier claim, and whether the client gets a notice.
Project manager
Connected systems
Site update Halden Works Groundworks, Friday
Result
Completed automatically
Requires a person
Whether an early warning goes out, and when.
Contracts manager
This demo uses fictional data. The workflow gets configured around your systems. Build a workflow like this
The work
Site capture usually goes first because the site feels it immediately and because it starts filling the record everything else needs. Each card names what the system handles and where a person stays in control.
A voice note becomes the report, the photos and the issue
The foreman talks for forty seconds. The system writes the daily report on your own format, attaches the photographs to the work items they show, matches deliveries to their purchase orders, and raises anything that moves a date as an issue with the impact already calculated.
Data: site capture, the programme and your purchase orders. Human: the project manager approves anything the client sees.
The same reference from the first call to the final account
Enquiries, site visits, quotes, revisions and won work on one record, so the firm can say what it quoted, what it won, at what margin and why it lost the rest. The estimating half of a construction business is usually the least systematised part of it and the one closest to the money.
Data: enquiries, quotes and job records. Human: an estimator prices it and a director approves the terms.
What was priced against what is actually being spent
Purchase orders, deliveries, labour and subcontractor applications landing on the job they belong to as they happen, so the cost position is current rather than assembled monthly. Variations get raised as variations at the point the instruction arrives.
Data: orders, deliveries, labour and applications. Human: the commercial manager owns allocation and valuation.
Margin by job type, client and estimator
Realised margin by work type, by client and by who priced it, with the overruns traced to whether it was the estimate, the programme, the subcontractor or the client that caused them. This one comes last because it stands on the record the other three build.
Data: your own job costing and delivery records. Human: directors decide what the firm stops bidding for.
The programme is the part that has to be real before any of this is interesting. A system can only tell you what a two day slip moves if something says what waits on what. Most contracting businesses have that in a planning tool that nobody has updated since week three, and getting it back to being true is usually part of the first engagement rather than an assumption underneath it.
The decisions
These get agreed with whoever runs the sites and whoever owns the commercial position before a build starts. Between them they decide what the workflow is allowed to be.
What counts as working. Accepted output against your own baseline is the proof. The baseline gets taken before the build exists, and afterwards the same work is measured against it with the review burden counted openly, because a system that produces plenty and has to be corrected twice has saved nothing. How we measure AI work sets out the method.
How it starts
Roughly eight to twelve weeks from the first session to a workflow running against a baseline you set, on one live job rather than across the whole business.
Proof
The approach on this page comes out of these engagements. Two are businesses that move physical goods and run on process, and two are the design patterns the workflows above are built on.
Argent supplies furnishing and construction materials and was expanding into new markets with the operation held together by people. Brand strategy, growth marketing and process improvement, delivered together because the demand would have broken the operation on its own.
Inventory and operations mapped across every department for a specialty manufacturer, with the plan assessed and accepted by a funding body. The same discipline a construction business needs before it buys anything: know what the operation does before choosing what runs it.
Territory research a team used to do by hand now lands every morning without anyone triggering it. The pattern behind the enquiry workflow above: assembling that a person would do badly at nine in the evening, done before the day starts.
An escrow exchange built from nothing, for people sending money to counterparties they have no reason to trust. Designed, built and deployed, with the controls as the feature rather than as a wrapper around it.
Begine Fusion is a Zoho Authorized Partner working across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Nigeria, with a team on the ground in Nigeria since 2013. Every engagement is published in full, including what was measured and what was a design target. The full set is on our work.
Fit
The work pays back when the business is running enough jobs at once that no one person holds them all. If that is not where you are, the right column says what to do instead.
Where to start
The same five offers every other client buys, scoped to a business whose work happens away from its systems. Find the line that sounds like yours.
No price is quoted on this page. A sector is not an offer and does not have a price of its own. What a business here pays follows which of those six lines is the real one and how much of the job record already exists. Working out which line is yours is what the first call is for.
Questions
The seven that decide whether a build is worth starting, answered before the proposal rather than inside it.
The capture side is built around what already happens: talking, photographing and forwarding. If a workflow needs a foreman to open something and complete a form, we have designed it wrong and it will be abandoned inside a month. The systems that need looking at are the ones in the office, and site should feel like less work rather than more.
Capture queues on the device and syncs when there is a connection, which is the normal arrangement and worth confirming rather than assuming. What matters more is that a voice note recorded in a basement at 14:40 still carries 14:40 when it lands, so the record says when the thing happened rather than when the phone found a bar of signal.
No. It drafts, and a named person releases. Telling a client that a date has moved is a commercial act with a contract behind it, and a two day slip is often recoverable, which is a judgment about the job rather than a fact about the programme. The demo above stops at exactly this point on purpose.
Usually not. The common finding is that the programme is in one system, the costs are in another, and site capture is in a third that is really a phone. That is a connection problem. If the mapping finds a system that genuinely cannot carry the work, we will say so with the reasoning rather than a recommendation.
It can show what moved, when, on what evidence, with the source document attached to each date change. Whether that constitutes a claim, and how it is put, is for your commercial team and whoever advises them. A system that produced a claim on its own would be producing an argument, and an argument nobody can trace is worth nothing when it is tested.
A baseline is taken before the build exists: how long the day record takes, how much gets reconstructed later, how much cost lands on the wrong job, and how late a programme change is currently noticed. Afterwards the same work is measured against it, with the review burden counted openly.
Site capture is usually four to six weeks once the job record exists. If it does not exist, that comes first and runs five to nineteen weeks depending on scope. Ahead of both sits the mapping, which is two to three weeks and produces a decision you can act on whether or not we do the build.
Thirty minutes with a director, whoever runs the sites and whoever owns the commercial position is enough to name the first workflow, the record it needs underneath it, and the baseline it gets measured against.
