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. The true position of a job lives in four places, and assembling it takes a week. Unibuild holds all four on one record.
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.
- 01Cost 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.
- 02Committed, 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.
- 03Dated 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.
- 04Every 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.
- 05Adding yourself costs nothing
- Pricing is one flat monthly fee, never per person, and taking on more people never changes the fee. Every director, QS and contracts manager can be on the system. 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,
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
What a director asks
before anyone else
gets involved.
What does it cost, and what does the fee cover?
One flat monthly figure, sized to your firm and quoted in writing, that covers everything. It is never per person: taking on more people never changes the fee, so there is no reason to ration logins. No setup fee, and the contract is two pages. See pricing for the full terms.
What happens when we need something new?
We build it, inside the fee. Changes asked for after go-live are included in the monthly fee rather than charged at a day rate, and the fee itself is fixed for three years. Unibuild is bespoke construction management software for UK contractors: a platform in daily production since 2016, shaped to the way each firm already works. You get the fit of a bespoke system without the cost, the timescale or the risk of commissioning one from scratch.
Whose name is on the app our people install?
Yours. Your staff app is published on the App Store and Google Play under your company's own name and icon. Your operatives download your app, not ours, so they recognise it before they open it.
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, while the job is still running rather than after it closes. Labour, committed spend and subcontract sit against the job, and every total drills to the lines beneath it.
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, XML, JSON 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 certification is in progress.
Who else is running this?
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 the two businesses running 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
Bring the job you are
least sure about.
