Summary
Business Challenge
An office of six carries the paperwork for every public job. The wake-up call: one certified payroll with an apprentice at the wrong wage step froze a progress payment until the payroll was corrected.
- Hours typed three times. Into Procore, into Sage payroll, and into the GC’s spreadsheet.
- Payroll checked by hand. Each week the controller checks every worker’s pay against the job’s published wage rates, and no one else knows how.
- Pay apps sent back. Monthly payment requests go out about 10 days after period end, and an estimated 1 in 5 come back due to a missing lien waiver or payroll week.
- Extra work agreed verbally. Some of it never becomes a priced change order.
- Retainage left on finished jobs. Closeout documents are chased late, so held-back payments wait months.
What We Did
1
Started with discovery
Two weeks following one public job from a Friday timesheet to the cleared check, with the office team, two superintendents, and the owner.
2
Designed six automations that work through both systems:
hours, certified payroll, lien waivers, change orders, pay apps, and closeout.
3
Kept people in charge
Rules in code check wage rates, and the AI model never decides whether a rate is right. People approve every payroll batch, change order, and pay app. Social Security numbers stay in Sage, and the AI runs under Anthropic’s commercial terms, with no training on client data.
4
Planned a phased rollout
Back office (weeks 3-7), billing (weeks 8-11), and closeout (weeks 12-14), then two weeks of support. Each wave starts on one public job alongside the old process. A wave that misses its pass mark gets up to two more weeks within the fixed fee, then is switched off.
