Know your margin while the job's still running.

How is margin live instead of a month-end number?

Live margin in tectm is the difference between revenue earned and cost incurred, recomputed every time a record lands, not a figure rebuilt in a spreadsheet three weeks after the month closes. The moment an approved docket, a certified claim or a finalised diary line books cost against a budget line, the actual moves; the moment work is measured against an award item, earned revenue moves. Because both sides resolve to the same cost-coded spine, the gap between them, the margin, is always current, at every level of aggregation from a single budget line up to the whole project. The forecast at complete rides on top, driven by earned-value performance on the cost-loaded program. The result: a project manager sees variance the day it lands, and a commercial manager stops closing the month on a guess.

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 rather than 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, the estimate at completion, and the slippage against the captured baseline. One model carries both the money and the time, so a delay on the critical path shows up as a margin signal, not a surprise discovered when the costs catch up two months later.

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 upward contract’s rates, and an approved docket lands on three things at once: the downward contract’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 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 the Tectus engine runs three passes over your contract: 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. 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. No all-or-nothing trust.

The same pass indexes the document, so the contract is ready for the conversational Tectus assistant that will sit on top of it, coming once the core is built. That chat inherits the rule: it cites the clause, or it doesn’t answer, and it respects tectm’s permission model, so an engaged contractor only ever sees what their role can see.

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 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 your written response to an engaged contractor’s payment claim: it states the amount you agree to pay, the amount you dispute, 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 you dispute. 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 you 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 engaged contractor’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.