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The live margin instrument · Built and running

Know if you're making money today, not at month-end.

Every cost, on the line.

tectm is the live margin instrument for contractors. Cost-load the program, capture the work once, and watch revenue, cost and margin move together on every job. QS-led, engineer-built.

See how it works
Live marginSample project
0.0%▲ live
Revenue earned
$0
Cost incurred
$0

Figures illustrative

Every figure traces to a docketBuilt by a QS, not a SaaS companyAustralian data residency

Revenue above. Cost below. The program runs through the middle.

Whether you're running a tier-1 revenue contract or a $50K labour package, the model is the same. The program time-phases the budget; the site record closes the loop; the margin falls out. The gap between revenue and cost is your margin, and tectm keeps it live so you read it like a gauge, not rebuild it in Excel after the month closes.

Revenue

The revenue contract

SOR · BoQ · Lump Sum · Cost Plus. Payment claims, variations and certificates flow through here.

Your project

Margin

The evidence layer

Dockets, site diary, AI contract review, variations, payment certificates. One source of truth, every level of aggregation.

DocketsSite diaryAI contract reviewVariationsPayment certsCost codes

Cost

The budget

Internal labour and plant, materials, subcontracted scope. Committed vs actual vs forecast, every line, live.

One spine. The program loads the cost, the work updates the program, the margin tracks both.

02The spine

Your program is a P&L in disguise.

Cost-load the program, and the forecast moves itself.

A slip on the critical path is a margin event. Everyone else's software hides that, because the bars don't know what anything costs. tectm runs the program and the cost off one spine: the program carries the cost, the diary carries the progress, and the loading you put on the program IS the forecast: SPI, CPI, projected margin, live.

Cost-loaded barsPlanned value (4 curves)Earned valueSPI / CPIForecast = program loadingProjected marginBaseline slippage
app.tectm.com · Forecast

In tectm right now

The budget, the program and the margin are live. The evidence layer underneath them (dockets, diary, contracts) has been running for months.

Live

Live margin

Revenue earned against cost incurred, at any level of aggregation. The number you used to rebuild in Excel, kept current by the platform.

Budget module

Hierarchical budget lines, trade- and cost-type-tagged. Five values on every line (budgeted, committed, actual, forecast, variance) rolled up to trade, cost type or project.

Program (CPM)

A full critical-path schedule (forward/backward pass, float, baselines, Excel import) sharing the budget’s data. Cost-load it and it time-phases your spend.

Internal rate cards

Your own labour and plant costs, with date-effective rates. Locked to your organisation at the database itself, never visible to the parties above or the contractors you engage.

Cost codes everywhere

Every docket, PO and diary line carries a cost code, so cost rolls up against the right budget line at capture time, not at month-end.

Project dashboard

One headline figure above four tabs: cost control, the program, the open items waiting on the team, and contract admin. A site supervisor gets the non-financial half of it.

Document register

Every document a project holds in one place, including the purchase orders you write from your own template and issue under your own logo, colour and signatory.

Site diary

Your confidential daily record: own-forces work and engaged-contractor dockets on two tracks, each closing independently.

The evidence layer underneath

Live

Dockets

Daily record of labour, plant and materials. Engaged contractors submit, the party engaging them assesses and prices with contract-aware rates. Every docket carries a cost code, the foundation of the budget rollup.

Labour · plant · materials · Contract-aware pricing · Assess & approve flow · Cost codes on every line

Tectus mascot

Live · The Tectus engine

AI contract review

Drop in a contract; the AI reads every clause, extracts the rates, retention, milestones and risk with per-field confidence and a source-clause citation. Then you can ask it questions and get the clause and the page back.

Reads every clause · Cited to source clause + page · Per-field confidence · Ask it questions

Variations

Five line types, approval chain, audit trail.

Payment certificates

Your response to a claim: what you agree to pay.

Date-effective rates

No pyramiding, escalation-aware, contract-bound.

04Inside tectm

How the day-to-day runs in tectm

How the contract becomes a live margin number, and the evidence that keeps it honest. Each surface chains into the next.

What does it mean to cost-load the program?

Cost-loading the program means attaching each budget line to the schedule activity that will spend it, so your cost is distributed across time as planned value instead of sitting in a flat budget. tectm spreads each loaded line across its activity’s dates (four curve shapes are supported), giving a time-phased baseline of what should be spent by when. As the site diary records progress, earned value accrues against that baseline and the platform computes the schedule and cost performance indices and the slippage against the captured baseline. The loading is also the forecast: the total a cost code carries on the program is the figure every forecast column states. One model carries both the money and the time, so a delay on the critical path shows up as a margin signal the day it happens.

What does a docket actually capture?

A docket is the daily record of what happened on site, every hour of labour, every piece of plant and every load of materials, tagged to the cost code on the contract it’s charged against. In tectm an engaged contractor submits the docket from the ute, a contract administrator assesses and prices it against the revenue contract’s rates, and an approved docket lands on three things at once: the cost contract’s claim ledger, the project’s cost report and the budget line it’s tagged to, without double entry or a monthly reconciliation.

The docket is the only piece of evidence in construction that ties what people did on a Tuesday to what shows up on a payment claim three weeks later. Get the docket wrong and the claim is unsubstantiated, the accrual is a guess, and the margin is fiction. Get it right and every downstream number, budget, cost report, payment certificate, is defensible from the source up.

How does AI contract review read a contract without making things up?

On ingest, Tectus reads your contract end to end and pulls out the rates, retention terms, milestone dates and risk clauses. Every field it extracts is anchored to an exact clause and page number, and if there is no citable source, it leaves the field empty rather than guessing. Each cell in the extracted rate card carries its own confidence score, so the contract administrator knows exactly what to verify before confirming, field by field.

From there you can just ask. What is the retention cap? When is the next milestone? What does the delay clause say? Tectus answers with the clause and the page behind it, and it inherits the same rule: it cites, or it tells you it cannot answer. It also respects tectm’s permission model, so an engaged contractor only ever sees what their role can see.

What landed recently

We ship in public. Every one of these is running in tectm today.

The claim got assessed line by line

August

Every claim line carries a cost code, pre-filled from the docket line it came from, and nothing certifies while a line is uncoded. Assess the line rather than the total, and every approved variation line arrives as an award item you can claim against.

Your history came in from Excel

August

One docket workbook per contract brings a job that started before tectm onto the platform, and a month already imported is refused instead of quietly doubled. Mark the batch settled and the accrual comes back down.

The project got a document register

August

Contracts, purchase orders and the documents tectm renders itself, on one register per project. Write a purchase order from your own template and your logo, your colour and your signatory land on every PDF the organisation issues.

See everything that's live →

From contract to margin, in three steps.

01

Set up the org + the project

Two phases of onboarding, with a guided walk for your commercial team on first login and a tour on most of the screens after it. By the end tectm holds the contract terms, the rate cards, the budget and the cost-code spine.

02

Capture the work + load the program

Dockets and the site diary record what happened; cost codes attach automatically; load the budget onto the program so cost lives in time.

03

See your margin + forecast

Revenue earned vs cost incurred, plus the forecast off the program loading, on every project, every line, every day.

Org setup · once

  1. Company details
  2. Trades you work
  3. Cost granularity (none / light / full)
  4. Cost-code library (Full granularity)
  5. Internal rate cards: labour classifications + plant items, date-effective costs
  6. Default overheads & on-costs (super, leave, workers' comp uplift)
  7. Tectus data-access scopes: what the assistant is allowed to see and answer
  8. Permission bundles: clone a built-in set and adjust it to your team

Project setup · per job

  1. Create the project shell (name, status, and the state it runs in, which sets its dates and its public holidays)
  2. Upload the revenue contract → AI contract review reads, indexes + extracts, you confirm: rates, retention, milestones, key dates, risk clauses; pick the contract preset (SOR, BoQ, Lump Sum or Cost Plus)
  3. Set the budget: hierarchical lines, trade + cost-code tagged
  4. Add cost contracts + purchase orders

From a two-person labour crew to a tier-1 commercial team.

tectm is symmetric: revenue above, cost below, on every project. The same platform serves the labour-and-plant crew claiming off dockets and the head contractor protecting margin across a portfolio.

Labour & plant hire

High docket volume, fortnightly claims. The docket-to-claim pipeline is the commercial workflow.

Subcontractors

Sit in the middle of the chain: claim up, cost down, both on one platform.

Head contractors

Portfolio margin, SoPA compliance, cost-loaded programs across concurrent projects.

QSs & commercial managers

Budget, forecast and rollup at every level of aggregation.

No more rebuilding margin in Excel.

When the docket carries the cost code, the contract carries the rate and the program carries the time, the budget rolls up by itself. Substantiation is a trace, not a hunt.

Frequently asked questions

What's live today?

The spine: the budget module, live margin, the cost-loaded CPM program whose loading is the forecast, internal rate cards, cost codes, and a project dashboard that ranks what needs you today above four tabs.

The evidence underneath it: dockets, the site diary, AI contract review, variations, payment claims and payment certificates, date-effective rates, and on-demand substantiation packets that trace every claim line to source.

Landed since July: the Tectus assistant answering questions off your contracts, the revenue side of the model (upward claims, retention, back charges, liquidated damages), supplier and purchase-order procurement, a document register that writes and issues a purchase order under your own branding, a budget sheet you type straight into, permission bundles you set yourself, an Excel path for the history of a job that started before tectm, and dockets and the diary from the phone on site.

Cashflow is the next big one.

Is this another platform we have to compare to Procore?

No. Procore is a document system, and the comparison people reach for is the wrong axis: the question tectm answers is whether a job is making money right now, which a document store has no way to know. It sits across what you already run, so there is nothing to rip out.

Do you do scheduling?

Yes. A full critical-path program: forward/backward pass, float, baselines, Excel import. The difference is it shares the budget's data, so you cost-load it and it time-phases your spend into planned value, and that loading is the forecast the budget sheet reads. Desktop today; a field view is on the roadmap.

We run jobs in more than one state. Does that break anything?

No. A project resolves its dates where the work is, so a Perth job stops being priced on Sydney time and a Queensland one stops inheriting a public holiday it never had. The docket import prices against the project's own holiday calendar too.

How is this different from MS Project / Primavera?

Your program is a P&L in disguise. They draw the bars without knowing what anything costs or what you'll make. tectm's program is cost-loaded and tied to the budget and the margin, so a slip on the critical path shows up as a margin number that day, rather than a surprise two months later.

How does the AI contract review avoid making things up?

Every field it extracts cites the exact clause and page it came from, with a confidence score, and you confirm before it's applied. No source, no field. The Tectus chat runs on the same rule: it cites the clause, or it tells you it can't answer.

How does this fit with Procore, Payapps, MS Project and our accounting system?

tectm sits where they don't. Procore stores documents. Payapps wraps a payment claim. MS Project draws the bars. Xero books the invoice. None of them connect the docket to the budget line to the cost-loaded program to the margin number. That's our lane. Native finance integration is on the roadmap.

Where does our data live, and who can see it?

Australian data residency. Your internal rate cards and computed cost data are locked to your organisation at the database itself, not by the app choosing what to show, so a front-end bug cannot leak what the database has already refused. The parties above you and the contractors below you never see them. Every action is in the audit trail.

Who can do what inside your own organisation is yours to set. Clone one of the built-in permission bundles, adjust it to how your team works, and a re-grade states how many people it affects before you commit to it.

Is the platform built, or is this a roadmap?

V1 is live end-to-end: budget, program and margin run on real data today. We ship in public and we're honest about what's next, but the spine is built and running.

How do I get access?

Book a demo and we'll walk tectm on your own contracts. Pilots are open.

See your margin on your own contract.

Book a demo and we'll load one of your projects live.