The office

Your office is the
heaviest user of all.

Estimators, contracts managers, commercial managers, accounts, HR, compliance and the directors. They live in the web portal all day, on the same records the site is filling in from a phone. Thirteen menu groups, eighty-seven pages, and each person granted only the ones their job needs.

See the office side → How access is granted

13 menu groups 87 pages beneath them granted page by page 18 access patterns in use

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

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, 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.

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 twenty-four 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.

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 twenty-four 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.
But the desk is still the desk: Estimating, payment applications, invoicing, the access panels, the reminder registers and the reporting all live in the web portal. We would rather say that plainly than imply your commercial manager can run a month end from a handset. 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

The field app in full →

What it does not do

Four things, before
you assume otherwise.

The office side is the largest part of the platform, which makes it the easiest to overstate.

It does not run your payroll

Unibuild does not produce a payroll file in any format, and there is no export to Sage or BrightPay today. What it holds is every hour attributed to a project, an overtime multiplier and a dated cost rate per person, which is the whole of what an export would need. If payroll is the reason you are looking, say so on the first call.

It is not an accounting package

It raises invoices, applications, statements and credit notes, handles VAT including the domestic reverse charge, and records payments and allocations. It is not a general ledger and it does not file your accounts. It sits in front of your bookkeeping system rather than replacing it.

Value-banded approval is not everywhere

Subcontract orders enforce approval bands by value. Purchase orders do not: approval there is by committee membership rather than by amount. Anyone who tells you every document in the system routes by value has not looked. Banding purchase orders is contained work, and it belongs in scoping rather than in a claim on a web page.

There is no offline working

The web portal needs a connection, and so does the app. Where that bites on site, firms put the scan point where there is signal or the office enters the record on the operative's behalf with a manual flag and the same audit trail. We would rather state it than let you find out in week two.

Everything in the six cards above is in daily use in a real office. These four are not.

Questions

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

How many of our office staff can have a login?+

All of them. Unibuild is not priced per seat, so there is no commercial reason to share a login or to leave somebody off. Add the estimator, the accounts clerk, the office junior and the directors. The construction deployment carries 48 active accounts against 101 on record including leavers, and the price does not move with either number.

Can we stop the office seeing each other's figures?+

Yes, and this is the question most often asked about salaries and margins. Access is granted page by page per person, so somebody can have the whole of Execution and none of Finance. HR is the group most affected by getting this right: staff profiles, hourly rate history and personal documents all sit behind it. What a person is not granted does not render on their menu bar at all.

Somebody leaves on a Friday. What happens?+

The account is deactivated, which blocks the web login immediately and revokes the mobile token on that person's device. The App Versions page lists every device that has used the app so a lost or unreturned handset can be logged out by name. Their records stay exactly where they are, attributed to them, because the audit trail is the point.

Do office people really need the app?+

Not to do their job, no. The honest answer is that the app earns its place in the office for one thing above all others: approvals. A purchase order, a subcontract order or a holiday request waiting on somebody who is out for the day is the commonest reason work stalls, and clearing it from a phone in the car park removes that. Beyond approvals, most office staff work at the desk.

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

Some of it will, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. 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 is the configuration around it: your menu structure, your access patterns, your document templates on your letterhead, your approval routes and your rates. Implementation is phased and there is a sandbox to practise in first.

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

Less than you would expect, because most records originate in the field rather than at the desk. Punch-ins, site diaries, day works, photographs, certificates and near miss reports all arrive from the app already attributed to a project. The office's job becomes checking, approving and acting on them. The registers that do need office maintenance are the ones that always did: rates, suppliers, subcontractor documents and staff records.

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

Yes, and it is the half they genuinely share. The site services business has run its office on the platform for a decade and the construction business since 2023. They differ sharply on the surfaces around it, because one has never switched on the client portal and the other has never switched on the stores, but both offices work in the same web portal every day. That is the tailoring argument with the evidence attached.

The platform