Industry
A mid-sized contractor or building-products supplier lives in paperwork: submittals, RFIs, pay applications, lien waivers, supplier quotes, change orders, certified payroll. Most of the labor in that stack isn't judgment — it's reading one document and retyping it into another. We automate the retyping and keep your people on the judgment, with a human approval gate on every step by design.
The grind
Pay applications mean pulling percent-complete from the field, recalculating retainage, updating the schedule of values, and chasing conditional lien waivers from every sub and supplier — under a deadline the GC or owner won't move.
Every submittal has to be logged, tracked against its spec section, and chased when the ball sits in someone else's court. The information exists — it's just scattered across email threads, PDF attachments, and whoever happens to remember.
Three quotes for the same package arrive in three formats — different units, different alternates, exclusions buried on page four. Someone senior burns an afternoon building a comparison sheet before purchasing can even start.
The work gets directed in a phone call, priced from scattered emails, and documented weeks later. Every change order that sits unwritten and unbilled is money you've already spent on labor and material.
The split
We automate
Submittal and RFI logs — reads incoming documents and drafts the log entry with spec section, dates, and ball-in-court
AIA-style pay application drafts — assembles G702/G703-style billing from your schedule of values, with retainage calculated in plain auditable code
Lien waiver tracking — matches waivers received against payments due and flags the gaps before any funds move
Supplier quote comparison — extracts pricing, units, alternates, and exclusions from PDF quotes into one side-by-side sheet
Certified payroll drafts — prepares WH-347-style reports from your timekeeping data for a person to verify and sign
We protect
Approving pay applications — no billing leaves your office without a person signing off on the numbers
Pricing and negotiating change orders — what a change should cost is judgment and leverage, not data entry
Reviewing submittals for spec compliance — whether a product actually meets the spec is your engineer's call — and making that call is how they stay sharp
Sub and supplier relationships — payment disputes, schedule pressure, and hard conversations stay human
How it runs
AI drafts. A person reviews and approves. Nothing touches a live system without a human gate — that's the architecture, not a phase.
The full build architecture →A worked example
On billing day, the system reads approved progress figures against your schedule of values and drafts the full pay application — line items, stored materials, retainage — with every calculation done in ordinary auditable code, not AI guesswork. It cross-checks lien waivers received against the subs and suppliers you paid last cycle and flags the two that are missing. Your project manager reviews the draft, corrects one percent-complete line the field reported optimistically, and approves. Only then does anything go to the GC or owner. Judging percent-complete stays manual on purpose: that judgment is how your PMs know their jobs, and we don't automate it.
No, and we won't pretend otherwise. Our live deployment is at a North American manufacturing and packaging company — vendor quote processing, invoice reconciliation, commission calculation, and shipment tracking, all with human approval gates, running on the client's own servers. Construction paperwork is the same problem wearing different forms: unstructured documents in, deterministic matching and math, a person approving before anything is submitted. We translate a proven architecture; we don't claim experience we don't have.
It gets caught, because your PM signs every pay app before it leaves the office — on job one and on job one hundred. The exposure is also smaller than it sounds: AI only reads the unstructured documents, while every calculation — retainage, totals, waiver matching — is ordinary code that produces the same answer every time and can be audited line by line. New automations also run beside your existing billing routine until you've proven them on your own jobs.
They do the parts of the job that were getting squeezed: managing subs, pricing change orders while the work is still fresh, chasing the two lien waivers that actually matter instead of all forty, and closing out jobs on time. The judgment calls — percent-complete, spec compliance, what a change should cost — stay with the people accountable for them, because a back office that stops practicing those calls stops being able to make them.
We sit with your team, map how the work actually happens, and draw the split: what's worth automating, and what automation should never touch. You keep the map either way.
Map your workflows