tectm
Live now · Dockets · Tectus AI · Variations

Know your margin while the job is still running.

tectm is a project cost control platform for commercial contractors. Revenue earned, cost incurred, margin — live, on every project. Your dockets, claims and variations are the evidence underneath.

QS-led, engineer-builtAustralian data residencyBuilt for commercial construction

THE MODEL

Revenue above. Cost below. Margin is the gap.

Whether you're running a tier-1 head contract or a $50K labour package, the model is the same — and so is the platform.

Revenue

The head contract

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

Your project

The evidence layer

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

DocketsSite diaryTectus AIVariationsPayment certsCost codes

Cost

The budget

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

LIVE TODAY

In tectm right now

The evidence layer is built. The budget module is what we're shipping next.

Live

Dockets

Daily record of labour, plant and materials. Subbies submit, head contractors assess and price 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 · Your AI contracts expert

Tectus

Drop in a contract. Tectus reads every clause, flags risks on ingest, and answers anything you ask — citing the exact clause and page. Available on every screen.

  • Cross-contract chat
  • Cited answers, every time
  • Risk flags on ingest
  • Permission-aware

AI contract review

Sections by TOC, structured extraction, clause-linked.

Variations

Five line types, approval chain, audit trail.

Payment certificates

HC response to claim — what you agree to pay.

Date-effective rates

No pyramiding, escalation-aware, contract-bound.

INSIDE TECTM

How the day-to-day actually runs in tectm

Five surfaces that turn the contract into a live margin number. Click through each — they all chain into one another.

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 a subbie submits the docket from the ute, a contract administrator assesses and prices it against the head contract's rates, and an approved docket lands on three things at once: the subcontract's claim ledger, the project's cost report and the budget line it's tagged to. No double entry, no monthly reconciliation.

The docket is the only piece of evidence in commercial 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 Tectus read a contract without making things up?

Tectus only ever answers from text that is actually in your contract — every response is anchored to an exact clause and page number, and if there is no citable source, it says so rather than guessing. On ingest Tectus runs three passes: a table-of-contents map that splits the document into navigable sections, a structured extraction of rates, retention terms, milestone dates and risk clauses, and a free-text scan for anything the structured pass missed. Each cell in the extracted rate card carries its own confidence score, so the contract administrator knows exactly what to verify before approving — no all-or-nothing trust.

Tectus also enforces tectm's permission model — a subcontractor asking Tectus the same question sees only what their role can see. Cost data, internal rate cards and head-contractor-only fields stay inside the head contractor's organisation.

How are variations tracked end-to-end?

A variation in tectm has five line types — additional work, omission, time extension, rate change, and provisional-sum adjustment — and each line moves through the same approval chain: raised, priced, submitted, accepted, rejected, or queried. Every state change carries a timestamp, the user who made it, and the supporting document, so the audit trail survives the project even when the people don't. Time extensions automatically push the contractual completion date, which feeds the liquidated-damages timeline so nothing falls between the cracks at close-out. Provisional-sum adjustments roll into the budget the same day they're accepted.

Variations are where margin slips quietly in commercial construction — a verbal yes on site, no paperwork, no claim, and three months later the cost is in the actuals with no matching revenue. Forcing every variation through one structured ledger keeps the cost incurred and the revenue earned in sync as the scope moves.

What is a payment certificate, and why does it matter?

A payment certificate is the head contractor's written response to a subbie's payment claim — it states the amount the head contractor agrees to pay, the amount it disputes, and the reasons line by line. Under the Security of Payment Act every Australian jurisdiction has a strict statutory window to issue it, and missing the window means the claim is taken to be approved in full, including amounts the head contractor disputes. tectm generates the certificate directly from approved dockets, retention rules and back-charge ledger entries — no spreadsheet, no copy-paste, and no risk of dropping a line in the handover.

The certificate is the load-bearing document if a payment claim turns into adjudication. tectm keeps every assumption that fed it linked back to the source docket or variation, so the head contractor can defend it line by line under scrutiny.

Why do date-effective rates matter for cost control?

Rates change during a project — award increases, escalation clauses, agreed rate reviews, midstream renegotiations — and the wrong rate on a docket priced on the wrong day is how margin disappears without anyone noticing. tectm holds every rate (labour classification, plant item, overtime loading) with an effective-from date, and every docket priced against a contract pulls the rate that was in force on the day the work happened, not the day the claim was raised. The history is immutable, so a rate review two years later still resolves correctly.

The same engine handles overnight shifts cleanly — breaks deduct from normal-time first, no pyramiding of overtime onto overtime, and public holidays in the subbie's state are honoured automatically based on the project's jurisdiction. The contract administrator audits the result on a single docket; the engine itself does not need to be re-audited every week.

SHIPPING NEXT

The budget module + the claim engine

We ship in public. Full roadmap →

The headline

Budget module

Hierarchical budget lines tagged by trade and cost type. Five values per line — budgeted, committed, actual, forecast at complete, variance. Rolled up to trade, cost type, project. Computed live from the dockets, POs and subbie claims already in tectm.

Trade-taggedCost-type-taggedLive varianceRoll up & drill downVariation-driven adjustments

Configurable payment claims

One engine, four presets — SOR, BoQ, Lump Sum, Cost Plus.

Substantiation packet

On-demand PDF/zip — every line traces to source.

Portfolio rollups

Cost, claim, margin across every project.

Mobile-first capture

Dockets and site diary from the ute.

HOW IT WORKS

Contract in. Margin out.

1

Set up the contract

Upload the head contract. Tectus extracts rates, retention, dates and milestones — you confirm in minutes, not days.

2

Capture the work

Dockets and site diary record what happened on site. Cost codes attach automatically; nothing rebuilt on Sunday night.

3

See your margin

Revenue earned versus cost incurred — live, on every project, every contract line, every day.

WHO IT'S FOR

Built for the commercial team

Tier 2 and Tier 1 head contractors running multiple concurrent projects.

Head contractors

Live cost, claim and margin across the project portfolio.

Project managers

Variance signal before it lands in month-end.

Contract admins

Claims and substantiation packets in minutes, not days.

Quantity surveyors

Budget, forecast and rollup at every level of aggregation.

Not built for

Residential-only — we focus on commercial contract complexity.
Generic task management — use MS Project or Primavera for scheduling.
“Everything apps” that don't understand contracts.

No more rebuilding margin in Excel.

When the docket carries the cost code and the contract carries the rate, the budget rolls up by itself. Claims write themselves. Accruals are numbers, not guesses. Substantiation is a click.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What's actually live today?
Dockets, Tectus (our contract AI), variations, payment certificates, and date-effective rates. Together they form the evidence layer — every claim, every variation traces back to what happened on site. The budget module, configurable payment claims, and portfolio rollups are the next wave.
How does Tectus avoid making things up?
Every answer cites the exact clause and page from your own contracts. No source, no answer. Tectus also flags time-bars, caps and back-charge gates on ingest, and respects role-based permissions — subbies can't see your internal cost data.
What kind of projects is tectm built for?
Commercial construction — projects with contracts, claims, variations and formal correspondence. The model is symmetric, so a head contractor on one project can simultaneously be a subcontractor on another using the same platform.
How does this fit with Procore, Payapps and our accounting system?
tectm sits where they don't. Procore stores documents. Payapps wraps a payment claim. Xero books the invoice. None of them connect the docket to the budget line 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. Internal rate cards and computed cost data are RLS-scoped to your org — never visible to clients above you or subbies below. Every action is in the audit trail.
How do I get access?
Book a demo and we'll walk you through tectm on your own contracts. Pilots are open — early users help shape the budget module and claim engine before they ship.

Stop closing the month on a guess.

The evidence layer is live. The budget module is next. Come in on the pilot — help shape it.