Industries

The paperwork should not be three weeks behind the job

Field work moves daily. Submittals, RFIs and change orders move whenever someone gets to them. That gap is where schedule and margin go.

What we build here

  • Field-initiated change tickets
  • A submittal and RFI log that chases itself
  • Daily reports drafted from what already happened
  • Invoice intake and committed cost in near real time

General and specialty contractors losing margin in RFIs, submittals and change orders. We connect the field to the office so paperwork stops trailing the work.

of contract value typically recovered by writing change work up on the day

1–3%

of contract value typically recovered by writing change work up on the day

a week typically returned to each superintendent on reporting

5–8 hrs

a week typically returned to each superintendent on reporting

earlier that cost overruns typically surface on a job

3–4 weeks

earlier that cost overruns typically surface on a job

Ranges from engagements and process maps in this sector. Your numbers are your numbers. We measure them before we quote, not after.

The work

Where the week actually goes.

None of this is exotic. It’s the ordinary friction that never makes it onto anyone’s priority list because it’s everyone’s job and no one’s project.

  1. 01

    The change order nobody wrote up

    The owner asks for something in the field, your super says yes to keep the job moving, and the ticket never gets written. Two months later you’re arguing over an email nobody can find. Unbilled change work is the most reliable way a profitable job turns into a break-even one.

  2. 02

    The submittal log lives in one person’s head

    Someone maintains the log in a spreadsheet alongside Procore, because the spreadsheet is the one they trust. Approvals sit in an architect’s inbox with no follow-up until a material is late. Nobody can say today which submittals are blocking which activities.

  3. 03

    Daily reports typed twice, at night

    Supers write the report in a truck at 6pm from photos and memory. Manpower counts get re-typed into the schedule, weather gets copied from a phone, and delay documentation, the thing that wins a claim, is thin exactly on the days it matters most.

  4. 04

    Committed cost that’s always a month stale

    Subcontractor invoices come in by email, get coded by hand, and hit QuickBooks weeks after the work. The PM’s cost-to-complete is built on numbers that are already wrong, so overruns show up at 80% complete instead of at 30%, when you could still do something.

The fix

What we build, and what it replaces.

Every one of these runs in your accounts, against your real data, with a named person owning the exceptions. Nothing here needs your team to learn a new tool.

  • Field-initiated change tickets

    The super sends a photo and a voice note from the field. Claude drafts the change event (scope, referenced drawing, affected activities) and it lands in Procore as a pending item with a named approver and a clock on it. The ticket exists the day the work is asked for, not the month the dispute starts.

  • A submittal and RFI log that chases itself

    n8n watches the Procore log and escalates on your ball-in-court rules: reminder at day 5, PM task at day 10, named escalation at day 14. Every RFI is tagged to the schedule activity it blocks, so the weekly report shows what’s actually at risk instead of a list of open items.

  • Daily reports drafted from what already happened

    Photos, time entries and weather assemble the report automatically; the super reviews and signs off in a few minutes on a phone. Delay conditions are flagged and evidenced on the day they occur, which is the only time that evidence is worth anything.

  • Invoice intake and committed cost in near real time

    Sub invoices arrive at one address. They’re read, matched to the commitment and cost code, checked against the schedule of values, and posted to Procore and QuickBooks. Exceptions route to a human: over-billing, a missing lien waiver, no matching commitment. Everything else posts clean, so the PM’s numbers are days old rather than a month.

Questions

What people in this sector ask first.

We already pay for Procore. Why add anything?

Procore holds the record well. It doesn’t chase an architect who’s sat on a submittal for two weeks, it doesn’t code a sub invoice, and it doesn’t write a change ticket from a photo. We build those on top of Procore’s API. If Procore ships one of them natively, we retire ours.

Our supers won’t use another app.

They don’t get one. They send a photo and a voice note to a number they already text. Everything else happens behind that. If a workflow needs a super to learn a new tool, we’ve designed it wrong.

Can AI be trusted to code invoices to the right cost code?

It’s trusted to propose, not to post. Confident matches against an existing commitment post automatically and are logged. Anything ambiguous, over-billed or missing a waiver goes to your PM with the reason attached. You set the threshold and can move it once you’ve watched it run.

We run 12 jobs at a time. Does this scale down to that?

That’s the size where it pays best. At 12 jobs you have enough paperwork to hurt and not enough back office to absorb it. We usually start with invoice intake or the submittal log, whichever is costing you more this quarter.

Let’s put a number on it.

Thirty minutes. We’ll ask where your week goes, tell you which of the above we’d automate first, and what it’s worth. You leave with a written summary either way.