Cost
control
01Labour, materials and subcontract against a job while it is still running, assembled from records the business was creating anyway.
Where the money wentLive
For directors
The number, without
The number, without
ringing round for it.
A director's problem is rarely a missing feature. It is that the true position of a job lives in four places: the estimate in a spreadsheet, the labour in somebody's head, the orders in an inbox and the invoices in the accounts package. Assembling it takes a week, by which time it has moved. Unibuild holds all four on one record, so the position exists continuously instead of being reconstructed.
cost accrues as it happens
orders counted at commitment
labour at dated cost rates
every total opens up
The week you actually have
You do not need a report.
You need the report to
already be true.
Most reporting problems in a contracting business are timing problems. The figure is not wrong; it is late, and late is the same as wrong when you are deciding whether to take the next job.
- Cost while the job is running
- Labour comes from approved timesheets at a dated cost rate per person, materials from purchase orders, and subcontract from the orders and payments already raised. It accrues as the work happens rather than when the invoices land, so the figure on a Wednesday is a real figure and not a guess pending month end.
- Committed, not just spent
- A purchase order counts against the job the moment it is raised, not when the invoice arrives. That is the difference between knowing a job is going to lose money and finding out that it did.
- Dated rates, so history does not move
- Cost rates are held per person with a date. Award a rise in June and the May costs stay as they were. Without that, every pay review silently rewrites the profitability of every job you have already closed.
- Every total opens
- A number you cannot interrogate is a number you will not act on. Each total drills to the lines beneath it, down to the timesheet, the order or the valuation it came from, with the person and the timestamp attached.
- Adding yourself costs nothing
- Pricing is a flat monthly fee and never per person, so putting every director, QS and contracts manager on the system does not change the bill. The alternative, rationing logins, is how firms end up with one person exporting spreadsheets for everybody else.
What you would actually open
Six parts of the platform a director opens,
and what each one settles.
Cost
01Applications
for payment
02Built from work already measured on site and signed by the client, carrying retention and the previously certified position.
Measured work to cashLive
Aged debt
by manager
03Outstanding money attributed to the person responsible for the relationship, rather than sitting in one undifferentiated ledger total.
Who chases whatLive
Subcontract
position
04Orders, variations, invoices and the payment position per subcontractor, with insurance currency shown against the firm before you instruct them again.
Exposure, not guessworkLive
Approval
routes
05Who can commit what, set per person and per page, so authority matches the org chart instead of matching whoever has the password.
Delegated properlyLive
The audit
trail
06Append-only, signed and timestamped across every approval, sign-off and change. The thing you want to exist before you need it.
Evidence, laterLive
Asked on the first call
What a director asks
before anyone else
gets involved.
What does it cost, and what changes the price?+
One flat monthly figure, sized to the modules you use, quoted in writing. It is never per person, so headcount does not move the bill and there is no reason to ration logins. No setup fee, no VAT added, and the contract is two pages. See pricing for the full terms.
How long before we are actually using it?+
About two weeks for most firms, with data migration included in the figure. It goes live in phases rather than as one switch, and there is a sandbox so your people can get it wrong somewhere that does not matter first. See how implementation works.
Can I see what a job has cost without asking anybody?+
Yes, for labour, committed spend and subcontract, and while the job is still running rather than after it closes. Every total drills to the lines beneath it. The gap is materials consumed from stores, which carry no value. See the section above, which sets out exactly what is and is not in the figure.
What happens if we outgrow it, or want to leave?+
Monthly rolling, cancel by email, no minimum term and no exit fees. Export everything as CSV and PDF at any time, and we hand back a clean dataset within five working days. That is deliberately easy, because a supplier who makes leaving hard is telling you something about how they expect to keep you.
Where does our data actually live?+
AWS eu-west-2, London. It does not leave the UK. The company holds Cyber Essentials Plus and is ICO registered; ISO 27001 is in progress rather than held, and we will not describe it as anything else until we have been audited.
Who else is running this, honestly?+
Two businesses, and they use it very differently: one has never switched on the client portal, the other has never switched on the stores. That is the argument for the platform rather than a feature list: it has already been bent into two shapes. See who runs on it and your four options compared.
The rest of the firm
Not the person who will use it most?
The same platform, described for the job each person actually does. Every one of them is a different set of pages switched on, granted per person, not a different product.
Next step
Bring the job you are