A construction company that finally knows what a job actually cost.
A commercial construction company with 26 staff was running its jobs across Excel, Xero, Tradify and AroFlo, with manual workarounds filling the gaps between them. We replaced the lot with a single system covering the first estimate through to the final progress claim — so the quoted price and the real cost sit side by side on every job, while the job is still running.
The challenge
Work was spread across Excel, Xero, Tradify and AroFlo, held together by manual workarounds. Each tool owned part of the picture and none of them owned all of it, so every question worth asking required someone to assemble an answer by hand.
The expensive version of that problem was margin. Nobody could reliably compare what a job was quoted at against what it actually cost. By the time the numbers were reconciled, the job was finished and the margin was already whatever it was going to be. A long list of other metrics the business wanted to run on weren't tracked anywhere at all, because there was nowhere for them to live.
What we built
A single operations system covering a job from the first estimate to the final claim.
- Quoting and estimating, with the quote carried through into the job rather than re-entered
- Job and project costing, with quoted versus actual visible on every job as costs land against it
- Variations, raised and priced against the original scope so scope creep shows up as a number
- Progress claims
- Purchase orders
- Subcontractor management
- Timesheets
- Site diaries
- Plant and equipment tracking
- Two-way Xero sync, so the same figures aren't entered twice
- Mobile access for site crews, in the browser on the phone they already carry
Quoted versus actual on every job, while the job is still running — not three months later, when the margin is already whatever it was going to be.
The technical foundation
The costing engine is the part of this build that matters. Every cost that touches a job — labour from timesheets, materials from purchase orders, subcontractor invoices, plant time — lands against that job as it happens, and is compared to what was quoted. Role-based access means a site supervisor sees their jobs and their crew's hours, while the office and management see across the business. Crews work from the same system in a mobile browser rather than a separate app, which is what made site diaries and timesheets get filled in at all.
The outcome
Tracking got simpler and less falls through the cracks. Forecasting runs on the company's own job history instead of estimation. And the business is getting more out of the team it already has — capacity went up without headcount going up, and costs came down.
Want something built like this?
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