The office

Your office is the
heaviest user of all.

Estimators, contracts managers, commercial managers, accounts, HR, compliance and the directors, all in the web portal on the same records the site is filling in from a phone.

See the office side in a demo → Ask for a quote

Construction office team working in the Unibuild portal

In plain terms

Back office software for a trade firm is the system the desk staff work in all day, on the records the site fills in. Unibuild’s office portal does that for UK trades and contractors of 5 to 300 people. Unlimited users, one monthly figure, a 14-day trial and no card.

What it replaces

The office is where fifteen
separate systems meet,
and where they fail.

Every one of these is a job somebody in your office does because two systems will not speak to each other.

Monday morning

Hours arrive by WhatsApp, photograph and text message. Somebody retypes them into a spreadsheet before payroll can start.

Half a day

Every application

The commercial manager rebuilds the payment application from a spreadsheet, the site diary and a folder of photographs, because no single place holds all three.

Rebuilt monthly

Whenever a PO is raised

A purchase request is a phone call. The approval is a reply-all. Neither is attached to the project the money belongs to.

Untraceable spend

Quarterly

Somebody opens the insurance folder to find out which subcontractors have lapsed. The answer is only as current as the last time they looked.

Found too late

At audit

The certificate definitely exists. Producing it means asking three people and searching two inboxes.

Two days lost

When someone leaves

Their laptop held the only copy of the current rates, and nobody is certain which version the last tender used.

Knowledge gone

The mechanism The office reads the record the field already wrote There is nothing to reconcile

See the office side on the records the site wrote, then ask for a figure.

Book a 30-minute demo → Ask for a quote

Who is at the desk

Six people in your office, and the part of the system each one lives in.

Access is granted against the real menu, page by page, from one panel per person. What somebody is not granted does not appear on their menu bar at all.

The estimator

Enquiries

Prices from one dated library rather than five spreadsheets, turns the enquiry into a quotation, and keeps the version that actually won.

Materials, plant, fit times and supplier prices in one place
Quotation out on your letterhead
Estimate against actual, section by section
The workbook everyone prices from stops being personal

Enquiries, Advanced Estimating, QuotationsLive

The contracts
manager

Projects

Runs the job: diaries, drawings, day works, call-outs, progress photographs and the labour plan, against the project rather than in a folder beside it.

Site diaries and photographs arrive from the app
Day works evidenced at the moment they happen
Approves progress photographs before a client sees them
Closes out the subcontract order and evaluates the firm

Projects, ExecutionLive

The commercial
manager

Finance

Values the work, raises the application, watches the cost position while it can still be acted on, and issues subcontract orders through the approval route.

Rate valuations measured on site and signed by the client
Applications with retention and the certified position
Cost against value, project by project
Subcontract orders banded by value for approval

Finance, SubbiesLive

Accounts

Money in and out

Invoices, statements, VAT including the domestic reverse charge, payments and allocations, aged debt by manager, and the inbound subcontractor invoice queue.

Every invoice carries the order it belongs to
Invoiced-to-date shown against order value on the row
Payments recorded on the subcontract certificate layout
Usually sitting on the approval committee too

Finance, Purchase, SubbiesLive

HR and
compliance

People

Staff records, hourly rate history, the training matrix read against each person's role, holiday, and the twelve expiry registers watched on one page.

Certificate and insurance expiry checked nightly
Training matrix against the role on the account
Agency workers approved before they can log in
The register is the record, not a reminder in a diary

HR & Admin, RemindersLive

The director

Oversight

Dashboards, the approval queues, turnover and aged debt by manager, and the audit trail underneath all of it.

Approvals waiting, on the desk or on the phone
Audit columns on 275 of 295 tables
Spend and payment position by month and by company
Can delegate access administration without handing over the keys

Dashboards, ReportsLive

The design decision

Nobody in your office
gets a job title. They get
a list of pages.

Roles in Unibuild are a label for grouping and headcount. What a person can actually reach is a per-person list, which is why two contracts managers at the same firm can have different systems.

Web access is granted page by page: One panel per user renders the whole menu as grouped tick boxes, exactly as the menu is structured, with a Select All for speed. Ticking a page silently grants its parent group so the page can be reached. A person with Execution but not Finance sees timesheets, day works, call-outs and site diaries, and the Finance group is simply not on their menu bar.
App access is a second, independent list: Granting Timesheets on the phone does not grant Finance on the web, and the reverse is equally true. A supervisor can have wide web access and a deliberately narrow phone. The two lists have no bearing on each other.
Spend authority is separate again: Membership of the approval committee is maintained on its own, not inherited from a job title or a page grant. Being on it also makes the Approvals module appear on that person's phone whether or not it was ticked, and drives the pending badge count they see.
And it is genuinely used that way: Eighteen distinct web access patterns and forty-seven distinct app access patterns are in use across the construction deployment. That is the practical evidence that this is configured per person rather than one template copied to everybody.
Access administration can be delegated: A non-administrator can be given the ability to open the web and app access panels for other people, so the office manager can add a starter on a Monday without the administrator role being handed around.

Page-by-page access granted per person in the Unibuild office portal

Put plainly A role is a label. The grant is the truth And it is set per person

Commercial manager at a desk reviewing figures

87Pages, granted individually

18Distinct web access patterns in use

275Of 295 tables carrying audit columns

Counted in the construction deployment, July 2026.

The office on a phone

Everyone gets the app.
It is built for the site,
and the office uses it too.

The field app is where the work is recorded, so its 25+ modules are written for somebody standing on a site in gloves. Office staff get the same app and are granted the parts that make sense at a desk, or away from one.

The field app in full →

Approvals are the real office use: Purchase orders, timesheets, holiday requests, subcontract orders and agency worker registrations wait in the Alerts module. An approver sees the order number, project, subcontractor, works description and value, and approves or rejects from the phone. A director on a site visit is not the reason a £30,000 order sits for three days.
The home screen is built per person: It is not a fixed grid. It is drawn from the 25+ modules and each person sees only what they have been granted, so an office manager's phone and a gas engineer's phone are different apps in practice. The list is a tick-box grid on the web portal, so it changes in seconds without a new app release.
Same database, no sync step: When an operative saves a day work sheet on a Tuesday afternoon, the commercial manager opens it on the web portal on Tuesday afternoon. There is no overnight batch, no export and import, and no second system to reconcile.
The desk keeps the heavy work: Estimating, payment applications, invoicing, the access panels, the reminder registers and the reporting all live in the web portal, on the same records. The app is the field half; this page is about the other one.

The split Site records it. The office decides with it One database underneath

Three logins, three audiences

Which portal did you mean?

People searching for a construction portal usually want one of three different things, and this page covers the one that is not a portal at all. They are separate logins with separate audiences and separate data.

Client
portal

Client

The login you give the customer who pays you. Their projects, programme, approved photographs, asset registers, drawings and certificates, almost all of it read only. Also searched for as a construction customer portal or a contractor client portal.

Your branding, not ours
Scoped per person, not per company
Nothing about your subcontractors appears on it

Who logs inYour client

Subcontractor
portal

Supply chain

The login you give each firm working for you. The orders you approved, the invoices they raise against them, what has been paid and what is outstanding. Used by contractors and facilities management firms.

One account per subcontractor
They see their own orders and nothing else
Stops the chasing calls on a Friday

Who logs inYour subcontractors

Office
system

This page

Not a portal for an outside party at all. It is the back office your desk staff work in all day, granted page by page per person, and it is where the records the other two portals publish are actually made.

Your staff, not an outside party
Permissions set page by page
The source of everything the portals show

Who logs inYour office

Client testimonial

SME Building Services,
in their own words.

Niki Scarth, office administrator at SME Building Services, standing in the firm’s Croydon office with the SME Building Services mark on the wall behind her — **Niki Scarth**Office administrator, SME Building Services LtdCroydon · on Unibuild since 2023
Read the SME case study

It has always been a pleasure to work with Darshan and his team to create our completely bespoke system, which I can only describe as brilliant.

The system is constantly growing and improving. Whenever we need something added or changed, whether it's a new form that would work better for us or a new idea to improve the way we work, Darshan works his magic and makes it happen!

It has genuinely changed the way we work for the better, improving our record-keeping, automating processes and standardising practices across the company, saving us both time and money.

It's also improved the service we provide to our clients, who love being able to view their job and asset information live, at the click of a button.

Thank you, Unibuild!

Questions

The ones an office manager
asks in the first ten minutes.

Is this back office software for a trade firm?

Yes. The office portal is the back office half of Unibuild: enquiries and estimating, projects, subcontractors, purchasing, finance, HR and the compliance registers. It is one web login, granted page by page per person. The records it works on are the ones the site fills in from the phone, so there is nothing to retype and nothing to reconcile.

What does it cost?

One monthly figure, quoted in writing, fixed for three years, unlimited users. No per-user charge, so taking on more office staff never changes it. How pricing works, or ask for your firm’s quote.

Is there a free trial?

Yes, 14 days of the full platform, no card. Give the person who runs your office a login and let them try the approval queue and the registers against a live job.

How long does it take to go live?

Most firms go live in about two weeks, in phases. Menu structure, access per person, letterhead templates, approval routes and rates are set up with you, and your historic documents are loaded during implementation.

Can we stop the office seeing each other's salaries and margins?

Yes. Access is granted page by page per person, so somebody can have the whole of Execution and none of Finance. Staff profiles, hourly rate history and personal documents sit behind HR, and only the people you choose see them. What a person is not granted does not appear on their menu bar at all. App access is a second list, set separately, so a narrow phone and wide web access can sit together.

Who approves spending, and can it be done away from the desk?

The people on your approval committee, which is kept separately from page access and job titles. Purchase orders, subcontract orders, timesheets and holiday requests wait in the app for them. The approver sees the order number, project, subcontractor, description and value, and approves or rejects from the phone. A director on a site visit is no longer the reason an order sits for three days.

Who sets up a new starter, and what happens when somebody leaves?

Your office manager can be given the access panels, and adds a starter on a Monday without the administrator role being handed around. When somebody leaves, the account is deactivated. That blocks the web login at once and signs the app out on their phone. Every phone that has used the app is listed, so an unreturned handset can be signed out by name. Their records stay where they are, under their name.

Where does the office see Awaab’s Law hazard reports?

In the portal. A report submitted from the app raises a phone notification, an email and an entry on the alerts page, and whoever acknowledges it is recorded by name and time. The office completes the escalation and handover on the same report, and the Hazard Register shows every report and its actions. See Awaab’s Law hazard reporting.

Can we see who changed a figure, and when?

Yes. Approvals, sign-offs and changes carry the person who made them and when, and a correction is flagged with the original kept beside it. The director sees that history beneath every dashboard and approval queue. Unibuild keeps every record and log for seven years.

What does the office actually have to keep up to date?

Less than you would expect, because most records start in the field rather than at the desk. Clock-ins, site diaries, day works, photographs, certificates and near miss reports all arrive from the app already attached to a project. The office checks, approves and acts on them. The registers the office maintains are the ones it always did: rates, suppliers, subcontractor documents and staff records.

Our office already has a way of doing this. Will it be forced to change?

No, it is set up around it. The platform is a proven core rather than a blank sheet, so the shape of an application, an order or a certificate exists already. What gets tailored around it is your menu structure, access, document templates on your letterhead, approval routes and rates. Anything else you need is built for you. Implementation is phased, and there is a sandbox to practise in first.

Is the office side proven in the businesses running on Unibuild?

Yes, and it is the half they share. In the featured case studies, the site services business has run its office on the platform for a decade, and the building services business since 2023. Both offices work in the same web portal every day, with the surfaces around it configured to each business.

How many of our office staff can have a login?

All of them. Unibuild is never priced per seat, so there is no reason to share a login or leave somebody off. Add the estimator, the accounts clerk, the office junior and the directors, and the fee stays where it was quoted.

Last reviewed November 2026