Software for UK commercial construction firms
Five per cent retention on a £2.4m office fit-out is £120k. Twelve months later we’re chasing it and the client’s PM has changed twice.
You’re the operations director at a £6m-turnover commercial contractor, or the construction manager at a regional M&E sub-contractor running multiple commercial sites, or the in-house QS at a 25-staff main contractor doing fit-out + light civils + commercial refurb. The stack is mixed - Eque2 or Causeway or COINS at the bigger end, Procore for some clients, Aconex on the framework jobs, 4Projects on the planning side, Buildxact for some others, more Excel than anyone admits to in the middle. CDM 2015 paperwork sits across half a dozen Word docs and a Dropbox you can’t quite trust. The stage-payment ladder on a £2.4m JCT fit-out is a Friday-afternoon spreadsheet exercise - interim certificates, variation orders, applications for payment, retention sitting at five-to-ten per cent. The Thursday accident on site (the operative who slipped on a wet stair on the steel-fix gang) becomes a Friday RAMS audit and a Monday HSE-may-or-may-not turn up. The new groundworker’s onboarding pack - CIS verification, public + employers’ liability + tools-and-plant insurance, RAMS, CHAS / Constructionline / SMAS / Acclaim evidence, CSCS cards for every man on site - is a string of emails living in your inbox.
We make custom software for UK commercial construction firms - scoped per business, sized to the bit between the JCT certificate signed at month-end and the retention released at month-twelve, the subbie pack assembled, the site safety evidence one-URL-ready, the programme legible to the client, the sub, and the QS reading the same view. Not a Procore replacement - it’s enterprise for a reason. Not an Eque2 / Causeway / COINS replacement - they handle the CIS + ledger side at scale where you’ve got a finance director to drive them. The bit between the tools - the gates that need to fire before a subbie steps on site, the stage-payment + retention ledger that’s currently a QS’s head and three Excel tabs, the multi-trade programme that goes out wrong on Monday because it was right Friday, the CDM safety evidence that has to assemble itself in the background - that’s the bit we build. Tell us what your week looks like and we’ll come back with a sketch.
What you spend your week on that you shouldn’t have to
- Tender lands Friday for a £1.8m office refurb - due back Monday at noon. BoQ to price, prelims to scope, sub-contractor inputs to pull together, your own programme to draft. Half the team’s already on site.
- Subcontractor onboarding pack for the new groundworker starting next week - CIS verification (or the 30% deduction on day one), public + employers’ liability + tools-and-plant insurance certs, RAMS for the dig + lifting + WAH, CHAS / Constructionline / SMAS / Acclaim membership, CSCS cards for every man on site. Currently a string of emails across your inbox and three folders.
- £2.4m office fit-out, JCT Standard Building Contract - interim certificate due Friday, variation order from the client wants an extension of time, retention sitting at 5% (£120k), the QS is running the numbers in Excel and the last version-of-truth was Wednesday.
- Multi-trade programme - strip-out’s slipped because the asbestos report came back hot, first-fix electrical can’t start, the plasterer’s now booked two weeks later, the client’s PM rings every other day asking “will we still hit completion?”. The Asta export goes out Monday; by Wednesday it’s wrong.
- Thursday afternoon - the operative on the steel-fix gang slips on a wet stair. A&E. No major injury but RIDDOR-reportable territory. You need the RAMS, the toolbox talk record, the permit-to-work, the site induction sign-off - currently in three folders across two laptops.
- Final account 12 weeks after practical completion - the contract says you submit, the client’s QS audits, the back-and-forth on variations runs into the New Year, the defects period eats your retention release date.
- CHAS Premium Plus renewal, SafeContractor renewal, Constructionline Gold renewal, SMSTS / SSSTS evidence for the supervisors - three audits in the same quarter, £450-£1,200 each, the framework PM asks for all of them on day one of every commercial bid.
- F10 notification - the project ticks past the 30-day / 500-person-day threshold, you need to notify HSE before construction starts; the Construction Phase Plan template is the one your old QS wrote in 2019 and nobody’s updated.
- Sub-contractor payments - application for payment from your sparky, you’ve certified £42,000 of the £48,000 they claimed, the £6,000 dispute on materials cost is an awkward phone call that’s been put off three weeks. CIS verification at gross / 20% / 30% then has to feed the monthly CIS300 and the subbie’s payment certificate.
These aren’t problems for a generic CRM. They’re the bit between the tender won and the building handed over, the retention released, the safety file closed, the team home on a Friday before seven. That’s the bit we build.
Example problems we could solve
Five things we hear most often from commercial contractors and PM / QS-led firms - with what the solved version looks like in your week. Three are universal (tender response, subcontractor onboarding, programme comms); two are construction-specific where the cashflow and safety substrate genuinely earn the slot. Every build is scoped per firm: a 10-staff regional M&E sub probably needs the first three; a 40-staff main contractor running multiple JCT fit-outs concurrently might want all five. None of it means binning Procore / Eque2 / Causeway / COINS where they’re working.
1. The Friday tender that gets a 60-second acknowledged-and-on-it reply
The Monday-noon moment: the tender for the £1.8m office refurb lands Friday at 4pm via the framework portal. The PM’s working from her phone at the school gate; she sees three replies by Monday morning. The first one back reads as “on it”; the Monday-9am one reads as “scrambling”. The construction-specific weight is the background BD-signal layer - director appointments, share-capital changes, and mortgage filings on your target client list are real intent signals that arrive before the tender hits the portal - and the first-reply-paired-with-first-knew is the BD posture that wins framework work over a year, not a week.
Solved looks like: every inbound tender - framework portal feed, direct email, web enquiry, missed-call SMS, LinkedIn DM to the director - lands on a unified inbound surface that acknowledges within sixty seconds in your firm’s voice, captures the BoQ + due-date + named PM + project-type + procurement route, and writes the structured opportunity into your pipeline with the team-assignment prompt already loaded. The follow-up over the weekend isn’t a sales-voice template - it reads like a contracts manager, references the actual scope of the BoQ, and asks the two questions whose answers shape whether you bid (lead-time vs your current programme, anchored M&E sub-availability). The Companies House signal layer runs in the background - your target client list flags directorship changes and lending-event filings so first-reply is paired with first-knew on the BD side. The longer version lives at Trainable Inbound AI Agent; the commercial-construction version is anchored on framework-portal feed integration, BoQ + procurement-route parsing, and the Companies House background signal.
2. The subcontractor onboarding pack that assembles itself before the gate-arm
The Monday-morning gate-arm moment: new groundworker starting on the £2.4m fit-out Monday. CIS verification (HMRC online service - gross / 20% / 30% status), public + employers’ liability + tools-and-plant insurance certs in date, RAMS for the dig + lifting + working-at-height, CHAS / Constructionline / SMAS / Acclaim / SSIP-aligned membership evidence, CSCS card for every man on site. Currently a string of emails. Pre-start subbie admin is the source of half the Monday-morning delays on a commercial site, and one missing CSCS card is a half-day of programme slip the client’s PM remembers six months later at the retention conversation.
Solved looks like: at subcontractor engaged, the onboarding pack workflow opens with every dependency visible. CIS verification runs against HMRC’s online service with the result captured + the deduction status (gross / 20% / 30%) flagged for payroll; insurance certs upload to a structured store with the policy ref + expiry + verifying broker, and the renewal-due alert lands two weeks before lapse; the RAMS for the work package gets requested via the sub’s contact with templated accreditation-aligned formats; CHAS / Constructionline / SMAS / Acclaim membership state verifies via API where available or via a one-click “upload your latest renewal certificate” link otherwise; the CSCS card check for every operative happens at access-control. The pack assembles per-sub-per-project, with the evidence-current-on-the-day-they-stepped-on-site state auditable in retrospect - when a client’s QS or an HSE inspector asks “can you show me the onboarding evidence for [name] on [date]”, the answer is one URL not three folders. The construction-specific moment: the CIS + insurance + RAMS + CHAS + CSCS combination is the gate the principal contractor’s accountable for, and the build is shaped around making the gates explicit before Monday morning rather than emergent at the access turnstile.
3. The multi-trade programme that the client, the sub, and the QS all read from the same view
The asbestos-came-back-hot moment: strip-out’s slipped because the asbestos report came back hot. First-fix electrical can’t start. Plasterer’s now two weeks later. Client’s PM rings every other day asking “will we still hit completion?”. The Asta Powerproject / Microsoft Project / 4Projects export went out Monday; by Wednesday it’s wrong; by Friday three subs are working from three different versions of the programme. Programme slip on a commercial site is inevitable; the source of the project-management work is making the slip-and-recovery legible to everyone affected at the moment it happens, not at the Monday catch-up call.
Solved looks like: the project programme - held in Asta Powerproject, Microsoft Project, Aconex, or a built-for-you variant - surfaces a live read for the three audiences that need it. The client gets a stripped-back view (current week’s expected completions, planned start of the next trade, the milestones that move) on WhatsApp or email at the cadence they’ve asked for; each sub sees their own trade’s window + the dependencies they’re waiting on + the dependencies waiting on them, with a one-tap “flag a slip” that propagates the impact through the chain; the QS sees the full programme with the variations + EOT (extension of time) + loss-and-expense candidates surfaced as they emerge. When a slip happens (the asbestos came back hot, the steel delivery moved, the M&E sub’s lost an operative to a clashing job), the system runs the “what moves” cascade - first-fix electrical pushes by 14 days, the plasterer’s slot moves to dates that work for them and the painter, the client’s PM gets a structured “here’s the situation, here’s the new plan, here’s the impact on completion” message rather than a phone call you’ve been dreading. The construction-specific moment: the programme is the spine of every other operational conversation on a commercial site, and the build is shaped around it being a live document rather than a Monday-export that’s already wrong by Wednesday.
4. The stage-payment + retention ledger that doesn’t live in Excel
The £120k-twelve-months-later moment: £2.4m JCT Standard Building Contract office fit-out. Stage payments at strip-out / first-fix / second-fix / fit-out / completion / six-month defects / twelve-month final. Retention at 5% is £120k held. By the twelve-month release, the client’s PM has changed twice, the contract administrator’s moved firm, and the retention conversation requires you to reconstruct the certified-vs-paid trail across a year of Excel tabs. Multiply across an active book of six concurrent projects and retention exposure is what determines whether the firm sleeps easy in February.
Solved looks like: every project carries a structured contract object - JCT Standard / Minor Works / Design and Build / Intermediate, or NEC4 Engineering and Construction Contract - with the stage-payment milestones, the retention rate, the defects-period dates, and the variation / EOT / loss-and-expense workstreams as first-class records. Interim valuations run as a workflow against the contract: the QS’s measure + the sub’s application for payment + the variation orders received + the materials-on-site adjustments → an interim certificate that renders against the form’s statutory wording and gets signed in one place. Retention tracks per-project + per-sub with the release dates projected forward, so the £120k coming due in November is on the operations director’s dashboard in May, not discovered when the client’s QS goes quiet in October. Variations capture as they emerge (the photo + voice-note from the site supervisor lands as a draft VO with the rate-card pricing pre-applied for the QS to approve), so the final-account back-and-forth twelve weeks after practical completion is a structured reconciliation rather than a forensic archaeology project. On the firm-wide view, the operations director sees current retention exposure across every open project, with the at-risk ones flagged (client cashflow concerns, contract-administrator changes, defects-period overruns) - so the conversation that recovers the retention happens before it gets uncomfortable. The longer version lives at Stage Payment & Retention Ledger; the subbie-side CIS payment certificate chain, the CIS300 monthly return, and the multi-trade VAT-reverse-charge invoicing flow that sits alongside lives at Multi Channel VAT & CIS Invoicing.
5. The Thursday accident - and the safety folder that’s one URL not three
The wet-stair moment: Thursday afternoon, operative on the steel-fix gang slips on a wet stair. A&E. No major injury but it’s in RIDDOR-over-seven-days territory and HSE may or may not turn up next week. You need the RAMS for the work package, the toolbox talk record from Monday, the permit-to-work for that level of the building, the site induction sign-off - currently three folders across two laptops, half on the site supervisor’s WhatsApp camera roll. Site safety is the single highest-stakes operational layer on commercial construction; the Thursday accident is the moment that exposes whether the evidence trail was a side-effect of working or an annual archaeology project.
Solved looks like: the site-safety evidence assembles as a structured background to the work. Every RAMS captured per work package against the project, version-controlled when the design changes (so the live version on Thursday matches what’s in the folder, not the version the site supervisor printed three weeks ago); every toolbox talk runs on the tablet at the site office Monday morning with the attendees signed and time-stamped; permits-to-work (hot works, confined space, working at height, lifting operations) issue and close from the site supervisor’s phone; the site induction sign-off captures at the gate the first day every operative steps on site, with the CSCS card check from problem 2 already linked. When the Thursday accident happens, the safety folder for that operative, that work package, that hour is one URL with every piece of evidence the HSE inspector or the principal contractor’s H&S consultant or the client’s QS will ask for. RIDDOR reporting drafts itself against the captured facts of the incident; the “was the RAMS in place, was the toolbox talk done, was the permit issued” questions answer themselves. CDM 2015 Principal Contractor and Principal Designer duties live as structured roles against the project; for Higher-Risk Buildings under the Building Safety Act 2022, the Golden Thread requirement is treated as a structured data store from inception rather than a Gateway-2 panic. The construction-specific moment: the evidence trail is what protects the firm’s directors, its CHAS / SafeContractor accreditation, and the principal-contractor relationship with the client, and the build is shaped around making the trail assemble itself in the background - not because the regulator asks, but because the site supervisor on Thursday afternoon needs it.
The closest things we’ve already built
- hc-electricaldomestic + commercial electrician in Suffolk; the relevance here is the M&E sub-contractor side of commercial construction work and the trade-side pattern (job ledger, certificate workflow, customer / client comms cascade). The reference for how a Suffolk-scale electrical contractor runs the commercial-construction-adjacent end of the work - the same evidence-and-deadlines spine ports onto a main contractor’s site at scale. (Named pull-quote and final outcome figures hold until the permission checklist clears - full case study at Hc Electrical.)
- mmi-servicesa legacy insurance-claims surface we’re modernising (older PHP stack, lifting onto a current platform without rip-and-replace). Different domain, same operational shape: structured project / claim object with multi-stakeholder approval, status pipeline, document evidence pack, payment ledger. The reference when the right answer for a £6m commercial contractor isn’t Procore-grade software but isn’t Excel either - the in-between bespoke that takes over what already works and modernises what doesn’t.
- pharmaceutical-analytics.coma custom analytics dashboard we built for an analytics consultancy. The project / programme / retention dashboard for a commercial contractor (live retention exposure across all open projects, programme slip vs plan by week, variation-order value by project, subcontractor payment age, CHAS / Constructionline renewal calendar) is the same shape: operational data captured at every project touchpoint, decision dashboard for the operations director or the MD. See Pharmaceutical Analytics.
- mendbuddyour own multi-channel AI agent platform for inbound conversations across voice, SMS, WhatsApp, web chat and inbound + outbound voice. The 60-second tender-inbound acknowledgement in problem 1, the subcontractor onboarding chase cadence in problem 2, and the three-way client / sub / QS comms in problem 3 are commercial-construction-shaped versions of this - trained on your scope, your project mix, and your operations-side voice. See Mendbuddy.
Adjacent verticals
- Trades - buildersthe domestic-side sibling (extensions, lofts, refurbs, kitchen + bathroom, small commercial fit-outs at the smaller end). Many commercial contractors run a domestic arm or grew from one.
- Trades - electricians (commercial spoke)for M&E sub-contractor work on commercial sites; same shape from the sparky’s side.
- Trades - gas engineers (commercial-catering spoke)for commercial-catering gas-side work that sits inside a wider commercial fit-out.
- Recruiters + HRfor the construction-temp specialist whose placements run through CSCS + CIS + drug-screen and overlap your subcontractor onboarding pack.
- Accountantsfor the construction-specialist accountant running CIS verification + monthly CIS300 + CIS reverse-charge VAT on your behalf.
FAQ
Will the system replace my Procore / Aconex / 4Projects / Buildxact / Causeway / Eque2 / COINS install?
Usually no, where they’re working. We sit on top and replace the bits that hurt - the subcontractor onboarding pack, the multi-trade programme comms, the stage-payment + retention ledger for the projects that didn’t quite fit the enterprise tool’s model, the site-safety evidence assembly, the CIS + VAT-reverse-charge invoicing flow that lives across the boundary between project management and finance. If your current tool’s working for what it’s working for, we hook into its export and start from there.
Does the stage-payment + retention ledger handle JCT and NEC?
Yes. JCT Standard Building Contract, Minor Works, Design and Build, Intermediate, and NEC4 Engineering and Construction Contract - the certificate templates and statutory wording are coded against each form. Variations, extensions of time, loss-and-expense, final-account assembly run the same shape across both contract families. Bespoke contract amendments (the ones your QS adds at execution) get reflected in the per-project setup so the rendered certificates match what was actually signed, not the unamended form.
Will the site-safety evidence pack handle CDM 2015 + F10 + the Building Safety Act 2022 Gateway-2 / Gateway-3 regime for HRBs?
The audit trail (RAMS, toolbox talks, permits, inductions, accident reports) is the evidence layer the HSE inspector, the principal designer, and the principal contractor’s H&S consultant all ask for. F10 notification renders against the project’s threshold trigger; CDM 2015 Principal Contractor and Principal Designer duties live as structured roles against the project; for Higher-Risk Buildings under BSA 2022, the Golden Thread requirement is treated as a structured data store from project inception with the Gateway-2 + Gateway-3 evidence assembling as you build. The accountability for the role itself stays with the named duty-holder; what the system does is make the evidence assemble itself.
Will you do my CHAS / Constructionline / SMAS / Acclaim / SafeContractor / SSIP-aligned audits on my behalf?
No. Each scheme audit is the firm’s accountability with the named scheme auditor. What the system does is make the evidence (your management systems, your H&S records, your insurance state, your subcontractor onboarding trail, your accident log, your SMSTS / SSSTS evidence for supervisors) one URL ready when the audit lands, so the pre-audit prep that currently eats a week becomes a couple of hours. Renewal dates for every scheme membership and every supervisor’s qualification live on the same calendar - so the “have we still got CHAS Premium Plus?” question never blocks a tender response again.
Will the system integrate with Sage Construction, Xero, or QuickBooks, and handle CIS reverse-charge VAT?
Yes. Stage-payment certificates flow into Xero as customer invoices with the CIS reverse-charge VAT treatment applied where appropriate; subcontractor payment certificates flow as supplier bills with the CIS deduction (gross / 20% / 30%) calculated against each subbie’s verified status, and the monthly CIS300 return assembles against the actual payments made in the period. Sage Construction (the larger contractor option) takes a structured export of the same data where the finance team works in Sage rather than Xero. The longer version of the CIS + VAT-reverse-charge invoicing flow lives at Multi Channel VAT & CIS Invoicing.
Will the subcontractor onboarding pack integrate with CHAS / Constructionline / SMAS / Acclaim / SSIP-aligned verification?
Yes for the schemes that expose a verification API or a structured verification surface; the rest run via a one-click “upload your latest renewal certificate” link with the expiry date captured and the next-renewal alert scheduled. The sub’s evidence record carries the membership state at the moment they stepped on site, so retrospective audit lands cleanly.
What about the BD / framework-portal feed in problem 1 - does that work for public-sector tenders too?
The framework-portal feeds (Contracts Finder, Find a Tender, regional NHS / local-authority dynamic purchasing systems) all expose RSS or structured feeds we ingest. The Companies House background signal layer runs in parallel against your target client list - director appointments, share-capital filings, lending events, the lot - so the BD side of the firm reads as a signal-driven posture rather than a sales-cycle one. The Crown Commercial Service procurement-portal feeds get treated similarly.
What does it cost?
Every build is scoped per firm - depends on staff count, turnover, project scale and mix (commercial fit-out vs civils vs M&E sub vs framework-led), whether you’re a principal contractor or sub-contractor, how many of the five sketches above are part of the build, and whether multi-site rollouts are part of the brief. We talk it through, agree the scope and the price in writing, then build. Send an enquiry and we’ll come back with a sketch. See pricing for how we work.
How long until something’s live?
The tender-inbound acknowledgement and the subcontractor onboarding pack typically go from scope conversation to a working version inside a few weeks, with a couple more weeks of running real tenders and real subbie onboarding through them before go-live. The stage-payment + retention ledger and the CIS + VAT-reverse-charge invoicing flow ship together inside a couple of months once a project’s running end-to-end through them. The multi-trade programme comms and the site-safety evidence pack slot in alongside as the operational rhythm of a couple of live projects gives them their cadence.
Tell us what your week looks like
What firm you run, staff count, project mix (commercial fit-out / civil engineering / M&E sub / framework-led / one-off), your stack (Procore / Aconex / 4Projects / Buildxact / Causeway / Eque2 / COINS / Sage Construction / Excel + Word + Dropbox), where the operational pain lives - the tender response time, the subcontractor onboarding pack, the stage-payment ladder, the retention chasing twelve months later, the Thursday accident’s RAMS hunt, the CIS300 that takes a Sunday evening. Send an enquiry - what you do, what’s slowing you down, what you’ve already tried. We’ll come back with a sketch of what we’d build and what it would cost. No calendar, no demo to sit through. Email reply, scoped sketch, you decide.