You did not price it. You have to make it come out at that number.

How the job reaches you

The estimate is the handover document, and it is usually the last time it is accurate.

A priced estimate lands on you as a spreadsheet, or as a PDF, or as a conversation. From that point the numbers start to diverge: an order goes out at a different rate, a variation gets done before anyone writes it up, a trade slips a week and takes three others with it, and the figure you are reporting against is a figure nobody can now reconstruct.

BuiltUp's answer is not a dashboard on top of that. It is that the orders, the variations, the tasks and the invoices are all made from the estimate itself, so there is nothing to reconcile. When a variation is approved it writes back into the live estimate. When an ordered item arrives late or wrong, the programme knows.

1. 01

   The programme is built from what was priced

   Tasks are created per trade role with planned start and end dates, a progress percentage and an assigned team, viewable by week, by month, as a list, or on a timeline. It can draft the programme from the priced scope rather than from a blank chart, so the sequence starts from the work that actually exists on the job.

2. 02

   It re-plans around the weather and the deliveries

   The schedule guard pulls the local forecast for the site and re-plans outdoor tasks around it, writing a note onto the ones it moved, and does the same for purchase-order items that have been marked delayed or incorrect on receipt. It has a dry-run mode, so you can see what it proposes to do before it does it. Indoor tasks are excluded from weather risk rather than swept up with everything else.

3. 03

   Orders and receipts against the priced materials

   One action groups the priced materials by supplier and issues the purchase orders. Receipting is per item, with delayed and incorrect as first-class states rather than a note in a phone. Those states are what feed the re-plan in the step above, so a late delivery becomes a programme problem the day it is logged.

4. 04

   Everything that happens is captured as it happens

   Project threads, internal or client-visible. Files with a visibility column. Site attendance from the subcontractor portal. Progress against each trade. Not because a record is nice to have, but because in eleven months somebody will ask what was agreed on a Tuesday afternoon in March.

The four that keep the final account honest.

Not the ones that look best in a demo. The ones that decide whether the closing figure can be defended.

Scope creep caught in the message it arrived inPro

The out-of-scope ask almost never arrives as a variation order. It arrives as "while you're there, could you also…" in a thread. BuiltUp reads the client's own message, flags what falls outside the agreed scope, and offers to turn it into a priced variation with a cost, a client price and a schedule impact. They approve it in their portal. Approved, it writes into the estimate, and it can be invoiced from there.

A record that can be shown to be intactPro

The evidence pack copies and fingerprints the correspondence, changes, contracts, quotes, invoices, files, time logs and programme into a dated snapshot, hashed over a canonical form, with a verify step that recomputes the hash. It exports as a PDF with lettered appendices or as a ZIP with every original and its own checksum, and it tells you where the record is thin before somebody else finds out.

Subcontractors without giving them an accountUltimate

Subbies get an access ID and passkey, or scan the site QR code. They see their tasks, the site details and their contract, clock in and out, raise requests and post updates. No app install, no BuiltUp login. You verify completed tasks and raise snags against them.

Where the money actually isWIP on Pro · profitability on Ultimate

Collected, outstanding, overdue and invoiced across the portfolio, with margin by trade and an overrun view against what was priced. WIP reporting shows over- and under-billing across every active job.

Questions this comes with.

We already have a programme in Microsoft Project or Asta. Does this replace it?

Probably not, and it is not trying to. What it gives you that a standalone programme cannot is a schedule that knows what was priced, what has been ordered, what arrived late and what the weather is doing to the outdoor tasks, because it is looking at the same job record. If your programme is the contractual deliverable, keep it where it is.

Can I use this if the estimate was not produced in BuiltUp?

Yes. Scope items import from a CSV using a template it gives you, with duplicates flagged before anything is written, and you can build a scope by hand. You lose the tightest version of the argument, that the orders and variations come from the same figures the tender did. The programme, orders, changes, evidence and billing all still work off whatever scope exists.

What does the client actually see?

Only what you enable. The portal is per project, can be password protected, and has separate switches for the budget and for reference codes. They see the quote, the contract, their finish selections, progress, variations and invoices. Threads are marked internal or client-visible one at a time, and files carry their own visibility setting.