Construction and fit-out

The commercial control a main contractor needs.

A UK main contractor or fit-out firm needs subcontract orders, variations, applications for payment and site diaries on one record, costed as the job runs. Unibuild is bespoke construction management software built for that shape of firm, with a live cost position behind every figure.

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Commercial control for UK construction and fit-out contractors in Unibuild

Your week

Extra work gets done on a nod
and disputed three months later.

Your application is assembled by hand every month from four different sources. You do not know the true cost position of a live job until the final account, by which time it is history rather than management information.

Week two

The client's man asks for something extra. Your supervisor says yes, because saying no costs a week.

Never papered

Final account

That extra reappears as an argument. The only record is two people remembering differently.

Written off

Month end, day one

The application is rebuilt from the tender document, a folder of instructions and last month's file.

≈ 3 days

Halfway through

A subcontractor's employers' liability lapsed in October. They have been on site since.

Uninsured exposure

The delay claim

Your contract wants contemporaneous records. What exists is a diary written up on Friday for the whole week.

Discounted

Six weeks after

The job's real cost finally lands. The only decision left is to bid the next one differently.

Too late

The pattern A contractor's margin is lost in records nobody made at the time Not in the work itself

Subcontract orders27 numbered conditionsHousing Grants ActRetention termsVariationsDay worksSite diariesTrade attendanceProgress photographsApplications for paymentLive cost positionRAMSConstruction phase plansDrawingsClient purchase orders Subcontract orders27 numbered conditionsHousing Grants ActRetention termsVariationsDay worksSite diariesTrade attendanceProgress photographsApplications for paymentLive cost positionRAMSConstruction phase plansDrawingsClient purchase orders

What matters most to you

Six things, in the order a main contractor feels them.

All six are in daily use at SME Building Services, a UK construction contractor running on this platform.

Subcontractor
control

A two page A4 deed with 27 numbered conditions and an execution block for director signature and witness. Not an email saying as discussed.

Housing Grants Act payment mechanism written in
Retention terms and release conditions on the face of it
Required cover levels filled from the policies on record
Expired insurance drops a firm out of approved status overnight

62 automatic suspensionsLive

Site records that
support a claim

Written on the phone, on site, on the day. The gap between the day covered and the moment it was saved is itself visible in the data.

Trade, number of men, hours worked, description
Weather recorded next to the delay it caused
Deliveries, variations and information requests
Printed as a branded A4 document for a submission

949 trade lines recordedLive

Variations
that get billed

Priced on site, signed by the client at instruction and again at completion, then converted into something you can actually charge for.

Hours calculated from recorded start and end times
Two client signatures, each with a typed name
Photographs and video attached from the phone
Claimed is a status you can count, per project

Instructed, evidenced, chargedLive

Applications
for payment

One ledger per project. Applications and receipts in date order with the retention held and the outstanding position across the top.

One receipt allocated across several applications
Unallocated balance shown live as you type
Retention accumulated, released with its own flag
Outstanding value aged and grouped by manager

Assembled, not rebuiltLive

A live
cost position

Cost accrues from operational events, not accounting events. Labour costs the job the day it is worked, materials the day the order is approved.

Labour at each person's dated cost rate
Purchase orders counted at committed value
Supplier credits netted off automatically
Every total opens into the lines behind it

Weeks of warningLive

Project
documents

RAMS, construction phase plans and drawings held against the job with a full upload trail, and pushed to your client's own login.

Title, original filename, uploader and timestamp
Visible to the client without an email being sent
F10 notification flag on the project record
The full O&M folder skeleton created on day one

CDM paperwork, in one placeLive

The Construction Act

You pay your supply chain provably, on terms printed into every order.

This is the thing a fit-out contractor should test in any
system claiming to handle applications, so it has a section of its own.

01The payment mechanism, in the deed itself: Clause 20 of the subcontract conditions printed on page two of every order sets the application date as the due date, the final date for payment as 35 days after it, requires a Payment Notice within 10 days of an application, permits a Pay Less Notice not less than 2 days before the final date, and gives interest at 4% over Bank of England base rate on late payment. Clause 17 provides the adjudication route.
02A trail behind every notice: Because the order, the variation, the invoice and the payment are all dated records against one order number, the trail behind those notices is reconstructable rather than reliant on an email search.
03Carrying it up to your own client: The framework is written into the deed the platform already issues to your subcontractors. The same mechanism is extended to the receivable side for your own client, set up with the rest of the implementation.

Put plainly We understand the Act well enough to have written it into our own deed Evidenced against one order number

The regimes you live under

Principal contractor duties,
and the records that evidence them.

Nothing here is legal advice. Unibuild records and evidences.
The duties stay with the duty holder.

CDM 2015, regulation 6: The project record carries an explicit F10 flag, set at project creation and visible on the project page, the client portal and the field app, so every notifiable project on the system can be identified at once rather than from memory.
CDM 2015, regulation 12: The construction phase plan is held per project with a title, the original filename, the uploading user and the date and time, so it can be shown when the plan was put in place and by whom. Revisions are uploaded as further titled files against the same project.
CDM 2015, regulation 8: Appointments must be made on the basis of skills, knowledge, experience and organisational capability. A subcontracting firm reaches approved status only when your office puts it there, and the evidence behind that decision, being SSIP membership, accreditation certificates and insurance with expiry dates, sits on the company record. An expired document removes them from the order form overnight.
Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996: Implemented on the payable side as printed contract wording with a 35 day final date for payment, Payment Notices, Pay Less Notices and interest at 4% over base. The same mechanism carries up to your own client, as set out above.
RIDDOR 2013: Near misses, accidents and incidents are recorded with photographs, three signatures and the RIDDOR position captured explicitly: whether it was reported and on what date. The reporting window is flagged, and alerts go out by email and by push notification in your own app. Deciding reportability and making the report to the HSE remain the responsible person's duty.
Contemporaneous records in delay and disruption: The site diary records the delay, its date, the weather on that date, the trades who attended and the hours they worked, created on the day rather than assembled afterwards. Every diary carries the day it covers and the moment it was saved as separate values, which is what distinguishes a record kept as routine practice from one written for the purposes of a claim.
Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999: RAMS held against the project with an uploader and a timestamp, issued to the client through their portal, with per operative acknowledgement recorded on the toolbox talk register alongside a signature and the exact minute it was given.

Principal contractor duties and the regulatory records that evidence them in Unibuild

Questions from your sector

Asked by main contractors
and fit-out firms.

These come up in almost every demo. If yours is not here, ask it directly and we will show you the screen the answer comes off.

Call and ask+44 7587 557546 Or bring it to a demoBook 30 minutes

What construction software should a UK fit-out contractor use?

One that runs the commercial side and the site side on the same record, because a fit-out margin is lost between the two. Unibuild is bespoke construction management software for UK fit-out and main contractors: subcontract orders, variations, site diaries, applications for payment and a live cost position. It is a platform in daily production since 2016, shaped to the way each firm already works. When a firm needs something new, Unibuild builds it. Changes asked for after go-live are included in the monthly fee rather than charged at a day rate. See how bespoke construction software starts from a working platform rather than an empty screen.

What software should a UK main contractor use to run subcontract orders, variations and applications for payment?

Software that treats all three as one chain against one order number. In Unibuild the subcontract order is a two page deed with the Housing Grants Act payment terms printed in it. Variations are priced on site and signed by the client at instruction and completion. Applications for payment and receipts sit on one ledger per project, with retention held and the outstanding position across the top. The month end application is assembled from records already on file, not rebuilt from four sources.

What actually happens when a subcontractor's insurance expires?

An overnight job reads the expiry dates, finds the lapse, and moves that company from approved back to waiting for approval with the reason recorded against them. Because the subcontract order form, the small works order form and the weekly labour planner all list approved companies only, that name disappears from all three. It comes back when your compliance team loads the renewed certificate and approves them again. This is enforcement by removal rather than a notification somebody can ignore, and in the construction deployment it has demoted 62 of 164 companies on the register.

Will our supervisors actually fill in the diary?

They will if it takes two minutes, which is why only the project and the date are mandatory and everything else is optional. In the construction deployment the diary has been kept on live projects for more than a year, entirely through the phone, by a small number of supervisors: 294 entries carrying 949 trade attendance rows and 1,556 operative-days across 158 distinct trade descriptions. Every single one of those entries was created through the app rather than typed up in an office, which is verifiable from the record itself. The app is yours, published on the App Store and Google Play under your company's own name and icon. Your supervisors install the firm they work for, not a vendor's.

Can the diary be edited afterwards, and does that undermine it?

It can be edited, and every edit is stamped with who made it, when, from what device and from what address. The original diary date and the original created timestamp are both retained, so a record written on the day remains visibly a record written on the day. If you want entries locked after twenty four hours, that rule is added for you.

How does extra work stop being free work?

The day work sheet is raised on the phone, on site, at the time, against a real project with a sequential reference. The client's representative signs the screen when the work is instructed, and signs again on completion, each signature carrying their typed name and a timestamp. Labour is recorded per person with a start and an end time, so hours are calculated rather than reconstructed a fortnight later. When the site manager who agreed the work has moved on, you still have their name, their signature, the description, the itemised resources and the photographs on one numbered record.

Our project managers will not raise a client purchase order for every instruction.

Then the contract value will be wrong, and Unibuild makes the consequence visible. Project value is the sum of the client purchase orders on file rather than a number somebody typed, so it appears next to the cost on the project page, and a job where cost is climbing against a value that has not moved is obvious to a director in seconds. In our experience that visibility changes the behaviour faster than a policy does.

Can we set our own subcontract approval thresholds?

Yes. The banding mechanism is enforced: one approval up to the first threshold, one committee approval up to the second, and two above that, with the second approval necessarily coming from a different person because an order you have already signed drops out of your own queue. Your threshold values are configured during implementation, and changing them later is a change inside the monthly fee.

No card, no lock-in

Bring the variation
you could not prove.

0114-day free trial: Your real jobs, your real subbies, your real applications.
02Free migration: Subcontractor register, certificates, insurances, open orders.
03We run the first month end: On a screen share, start to finish, with you.
04Cancel by email: One sentence to success@unibuild.co.uk. Done.
05UK data, UK support: UK office, working hours, a real phone number.
06Unlimited users: The QS, the site, the office, the directors. Same price.