From groundworks firms to £100M main contractors, the story is the same. The work is good. The systems leak. Variations go unclaimed, retentions sit unchased, and the CVR arrives after the damage is done.
A bespoke AI platform fuses your commercial data, your site records, your compliance and your pipeline into one brain you own outright, on private UK infrastructure with snapshot replication to a separate UK data centre, with a website that wins tenders while you sleep.
The site team does the extra work because the job has to move. The paperwork lags. The QS finds out at final account, the notification window has closed, and the client politely declines. Your brain logs the variation the moment it happens, photographs the evidence, prices it from your rates and chases the signature before the contract clock runs out.
Most contractors cannot state their retention position without a half-day spreadsheet exercise. Defects periods expire and nobody notices, so cash that belongs to you sits in someone else's bank. The platform keeps a live retention ledger across every contract, flags the day a release falls due and drafts the chase letter for you.
Cost lands from timesheets, supplier invoices, plant hire and materials, but it only meets the valuation once a month if you are lucky. By the time the CVR says trouble, the trouble is historic. Live cost capture against budget means the platform tells you a job is drifting while there is still time to do something about it.
Plant certs, RAMS, training cards, inspection records: scattered across email, site cabins and someone's laptop. One lapsed certificate can stop a site. Everything lives in one place with expiry tracking, so renewals happen before they bite and an audit is a ten-minute export, not a ten-day panic.
Costs captured as they land, valued against budget daily. Margin by project, by phase, by package. The monthly CVR becomes a confirmation of what you already knew, not a monthly surprise.
Site teams log a variation from a phone in under a minute, with photos. Cortex prices it from your schedule of rates, generates the notice and tracks it against the contractual notification window so nothing gets time-barred.
Every retention tracked by contract, with practical completion and defects dates. The platform flags releases as they fall due and drafts the application. Money that used to leak now comes home.
Insurance, accreditations and payment terms in one place. Programme performance and defect rates scored from real data, so the next tender goes to the sub who delivers, not the one who answered the phone first.
RAMS, toolbox talks, plant certification and training records connected to people and sites. Expiry alerts fire weeks ahead. When the auditor calls, you export the pack instead of building it.
Every tender tracked with outcome, margin and client history. Cortex compares new enquiries against jobs you have actually delivered, so you price from evidence and stop chasing work that never makes money.
Cortex has read every contract, every valuation, every timesheet and every site diary. Ask it which job is drifting, which variation is about to time-bar, or which subcontractor to trust with the next package.
"It answers like a commercial director who has been on every site, read every contract and never once forgot to chase a retention."
Every director takes two minutes on the last Friday of the month. The brain collates their updates, cross-references them against everything it knows about the business, and produces the board pack. Then it adds its own report: an independent analysis no director wrote, with no political considerations, that flags what the board needs to act on before the meeting starts.
Q3 pipeline strong. Three tenders submitted this month totalling £4.2M. Coventry project delayed two weeks due to groundworks overrun. Northampton on programme.
SUBMITTED · FRIDAY 16:38Margin across live projects averaging 11.8% vs target 14%. Four unclaimed variations totalling £31,200 require urgent attention. Retention pot now £89,400.
SUBMITTED · FRIDAY 16:42Seven sites active. Birmingham steelwork complete. Two plant items due for certification renewal by end of month. Subcontractor performance reviews outstanding.
SUBMITTED · FRIDAY 16:46Cash position healthy at £340k. Three invoices overdue totalling £62,000. Xero reconciliation complete for August. Payroll running 3% over forecast.
SUBMITTED · FRIDAY 16:50The following analysis was prepared by Cortex from the director updates above, combined with live platform data. It is independent of any director's submission and has been prepared without prior sight of the agenda.
Live project margins are tracking 2.2 points below target. The primary driver is variation under-claiming. At current run rate, £31,200 in legitimate variations will lapse this quarter. This is a recoverable position but requires commercial action this week, not next month.
Three overdue invoices represent 18% of the current cash position. Two of the three have been chased once. Based on historical payment behaviour, Hargreaves Developments typically settles within 7 days of a director-level call. Recommend escalation before month end.
The three tenders submitted this month are well-matched to your delivery capacity and margin profile. Win probability based on historical conversion at this stage is approximately 40%. One opportunity is with a client where you have a strong relationship history and no lost tenders.
Two plant certification renewals lapsing end of month. If these are not renewed before the Birmingham site visit on 24th, you risk a prohibition notice. This is flagged as a high-priority operational action.
Cortex has no politics, no relationships to protect and no agenda. It tells the board what the data says, not what anyone wanted it to say.
It has read every director's update and cross-referenced it against live platform data before it writes a word. No human could do that in 40 seconds.
Every claim references its source. The board can interrogate any finding and trace it back to the underlying data, transaction or record.
Runs under the Sheriff: cites sources, flags uncertainty, never invents figures and always distinguishes between what the data shows and what it recommends.
A 30 minute call. No deck, no pressure, no junior sales rep. You talk, we listen, and you leave with a straight answer on whether a brain makes sense for your business.