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HMRC CIS return month ending 5 Aug · due Wed 19 Aug 12 days
CIS return due Wed 19 Aug 12 daysCDM 2015, RIDDOR and the compliance registers, built in rather than bolted onUnlimited users, every module, £0 per helmet30+ modules, one login, and the 15-app stack retiredQuickBooks, OneDrive, WhatsApp and email, wired into the jobGlove-friendly field app, QR-first, timed by the server not the phoneExpired subcontractor insurance drops a firm out of approved status overnightFree migration from whatever you run todayUK built, UK support desk, UK hours30-day free trial, no card, no obligation
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Construction and fit-out

The commercial control
a main contractor needs.

Unibuild covers the parts of a construction business that spreadsheets usually hold together: subcontract orders and variations, site records that stand up in a claim, labour planning across live jobs, and a live cost position while there is still contract left to act on it.

Book a 45-minute demo → See subcontract control
62 automatic suspensions 294 site diaries 1,556 operative-days logged subcontract as a deed
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
What matters most to you

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

All six are in daily use in a UK construction contractor running on this platform.

Subcontractor
control

01

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

02

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

03

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

04

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

05

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

06

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 honest asymmetry

You can pay your supply chain
provably. Serving notices to your
own client is not built.

This is the most useful thing on the page, so we have given it a section of its own rather than burying it in a footnote.

What is built, on the payable side
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. 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.
What is not built, on the receivable side
There is no field, record or document for a due date, a final date for payment, a payment notice, a pay less notice or a notified sum against your own client. An application carries a valuation date and a total. A business using Unibuild to raise applications would still track its own notice dates outside the system today.
Why we are telling you this first
Because the framework is plainly understood: it is written into the deed the platform already issues to your subcontractors. Building it on the receivable side is a defined extension of something proven rather than a new design, and for a main contractor or fit-out firm it is usually the first thing worth adding. A supplier who lets you discover that in month three has told you something about how they will handle the next question.
Put plainly We understand the Act well enough to have written it into our own deed Your side of it is scoped work
Construction site in progress with scaffolding
67Database tables carry the project reference
62Subcontractors suspended automatically
1,556Operative-days on the site diaries

Counted in the construction deployment, July 2026.

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. See the section above for what is not implemented on the receivable side.
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. Unibuild does not submit to the HSE and never will imply that it does. Deciding reportability and making the report 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.
What it does not do

Four things a fit-out
firm will test.

Better here than in the demonstration.

01
No CIS handling
No UTR, no HMRC verification number, no deduction rate, no gross payment status and no CIS300 monthly return. Unibuild manages the subcontract itself: the order, the variations, the invoices, the payment position and the insurance currency that decides whether you should be instructing that firm at all. CIS sits with your accounts package today. For your market this is the first question, so we have put it first.
02
We do not use the word profitability
You get a live cost position, which is the useful half of the question and the half most firms cannot answer at all until the final account. What you do not get today is a complete profit and return calculation. We would rather describe it that way than show you a report with a column that does not compute.
03
No retention ledger on the payable side
Retention percentages and release conditions are captured on every subcontract order and printed on the deed, and the deed carries a full mechanism releasing half at practical completion and the balance at the end of the defects liability period. What does not exist is a running balance of what you hold per subcontractor and per project with release dates. If you carry meaningful retention that is scoped work, and it is well understood, because the order terms and the payment records it would draw on already exist.
04
Notices to your client, as above
Set out in full in its own section on this page rather than hidden here. The payment mechanism runs one way today.

Everything in the six cards above is in daily use in a UK construction contractor. These four are not.

Questions from your sector

Asked by main contractors
and fit-out firms.

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.
Does it handle CIS?+
No, and we would rather say so now than in month three. There is no UTR, no verification number, no deduction rate and no monthly return anywhere in the system. The existing client runs CIS in its accounting package. If you need verification status and deduction handled against the subcontractor record, that is development work we would scope and price with you rather than a box we would tick on a comparison table.
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.
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 is a rule we would add for you rather than one we would pretend already exists.
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 no software fixes that on its own. What Unibuild does is make 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?+
The banding mechanism is real and 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. The threshold values themselves are set in code rather than on a settings screen today, so your figures are configured during implementation. Making them editable by an administrator is a contained change and we would price it if you want it.
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shorter than the last one,
we should not be paid.

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Subcontractor register, certificates, insurances, open orders.

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The QS, the site, the office, the directors. Same price.

Next step

Bring a dispute you are
currently living with.

The point We will show you exactly what would be on file That is the whole argument
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Email
[email protected]
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