Find and recover
every dollar of
additional work.
Out-of-scope work is priced by the people who do it least well: nobody. Change Order Systems detects variations from your drawings, field records and correspondence, builds a defensible notice package in minutes rather than days, and follows every claim from the moment it happens on site to the moment it clears the bank.
Your own workspace, isolated from every other company on the platform. No card required to start.
Variation revenue does not get rejected. It gets lost.
Almost none of it is lost in an argument. It is lost in the gap between the work happening and anybody writing it down properly — four gaps, specifically, and every one of them is a process problem rather than a legal one.
Work starts before anyone prices it
A superintendent says proceed on a walk-through. The crew goes. Hours and materials accrue against a ticket nobody has linked to a claim, and the cost is yours until somebody notices.
The notice period runs out quietly
Most contracts bar a variation claim that is not noticed within a set number of business days of becoming aware. The clock starts on site. It rarely starts in anyone's calendar.
The evidence is scattered by the time it matters
Photographs on one phone, the instruction in somebody's inbox, the dockets in a ute. Assembling a defensible package six months later costs days and still has holes in it.
Approved work never becomes cash
A variation is agreed, then sits unbilled, or is billed and never chased. The disputed balance quietly becomes the write-off nobody put a name to.
Every one of those four is measured on the recovery board from day one — unpriced work in progress, deadlines about to pass, missing evidence, and approved value that has not turned into cash. You cannot fix a leak you are not looking at.
Start a workspaceFive steps, and the platform does the remembering.
It sits alongside your project management and accounting systems rather than replacing them. Nothing here asks a contractor to change how they build — only how the paperwork keeps up.
Load the contract and the baseline
Contract, scope, estimate, rate sheet, drawings, programme and notice clauses. Extracted obligations and deadlines stay proposed until a person reviews them, each with a page and region citation back to the source document.
Capture what happened, on site, at the time
Voice, text, photographs, video and location from a phone that works without signal. Timestamp and device metadata are captured at the moment of the event, not at the moment of sync. A foreperson validates and attaches labour, plant and material.
Let the engine find the variation
Field records, correspondence, RFIs, drawing revisions and daily logs are continuously compared against the baseline. Anything that no scope item covers becomes a signal with its sources cited, its confidence broken down, and the evidence it is missing named.
Price it and serve the notice
Cost builds from the quantities already recorded, against the agreed schedule of rates, with every line showing where its number came from. The notice is generated from a controlled template, previewed with its recipients, and served only when an authorised person approves it.
Track it to cash
The client reviews an exact version through a portal that never sees your cost or margin. Partial approvals, comments and signatures land on the record. Approved amounts sync to accounting; payments reconcile; the disputed balance keeps a next action and an owner.
A notice deadline is arithmetic.
So we made it run like a clock.
Most contracts bar a variation claim that is not noticed within a set period of becoming aware. That period is not a reminder or a best guess — it is a calculation over a specific clause, a specific contract version and a specific working calendar. Treating it as anything softer is how claims get barred.
Rules are read from your contract, then reviewed
Clause extraction proposes the notice type, the trigger, the period, the recipients and the delivery method, each citing the page and region it came from. A rule built on an unapproved clause cannot start a clock.
The clock starts when a person confirms the classification
The engine never starts it on its own. Once a project manager confirms what kind of contractual event this is, the deadline is fixed arithmetic — no model, no heuristic.
The calendar is frozen with the notice
Weekends, public holidays and the business-day basis travel with the record. A deadline computed under contract version 1 still recomputes correctly after a deed of variation shortens the period.
It escalates before it fails, not after
Warning, critical and breached states surface on the board, in the register and on the notice screen — with the exposure in dollars next to each one, so triage is by money at risk rather than by whoever shouted last.
A subcontractor who misses a ten business day notice period on a $40,000 variation has not lost a percentage of it. They have lost the entitlement to claim it at all, along with the margin that was supposed to sit inside it — and the labour and material have already been spent.
Illustrative figures on a single mid-sized variation. Whether a claim is in fact barred is a contractual question for your commercial manager and your advisers — the platform records the position taken and the date it was taken, it does not determine entitlement.
Parity where it is table stakes. Difference where it matters.
Clearstory, Buildertrend and Buildxact are all real products that do real work. Here is an honest read of where we match them, where we go further, and where we would rather integrate than rebuild.
| Capability | Clearstory | Buildertrend | Buildxact | Change Order Systems |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| T&M tickets and signatures | Yes | Partial | Partial | PMobile and offline, signatures, geo and time evidence |
| Change request log | Yes | Yes | Yes | SRisk, value, aging and next-action intelligence |
| Labour, material and plant rates | Yes | Yes | Yes | PContract-specific markups with provenance on every line |
| Client approval | Yes | Yes | Yes | SStaged review, comments, partial approval, exact version evidence |
| Accounting and project integrations | Higher tier | Native suite | Native suite | DSystem-neutral connector layer |
| Automated variation detection | Limited / import AI | No public emphasis | AI estimating | DContinuous scope-to-field variance detection |
| Notice compliance | Workflow | Generic | Generic | DVersioned contract and jurisdiction notice clock with checklist |
| Dispute evidence | Logs | Documents | Documents | DChronology, causation and cost evidence pack |
| Recovery analytics | Reporting | Financial reports | Costing | DDetected-to-collected revenue funnel |
| Full construction management | No | Yes | Yes | IWe do not rebuild it — we integrate with it |
Competitor capabilities summarised from publicly published product information at the time of writing. Feature sets move; check current vendor documentation before making a decision on this table alone.
Anyone can raise a claim. The question is whether it holds up eight months later.
These six properties are enforced by the system rather than by discipline, because discipline is the first thing to go when a job gets busy.
The deadline is arithmetic, not a guess
Detection proposes a classification. A person confirms it. Only then does the clock start, computed by day-counting over a frozen calendar and stored with the clause it came from. Recompute a deadline three years later and you get the same date.
A submission is bound to exact versions
Every issued claim carries a content hash over its notice, its cost build-up version and its full evidence manifest. Revise the price and the old version is superseded — a client decision cannot land on it unless they deliberately confirm they mean to.
Originals are immutable
Evidence is hashed on capture and never edited in place. Annotation and redaction create a derivative that records what it came from, so the file you relied on and the file somebody marked up both survive.
Cost and margin never leave the building
Commercial fields are stripped server-side for restricted roles and for every external reviewer. Nothing sensitive sits in the page waiting to be un-hidden.
Every decision is on a tamper-evident log
Each audit event carries the hash of the one before it. Remove or edit a single row and the chain breaks from that point forward, which is exactly the property an adjudicator cares about.
Attribution is kept honest
Platform-detected, platform-assisted and imported changes are separated everywhere, so nobody can claim credit — or charge a percentage — against work the engine did not surface.
Priced against what it recovers, not what it costs to run.
Implementation runs A$2,000 to A$20,000 depending on project complexity, and includes the concierge setup and commercial review that make the first recovery happen rather than the first login.
A first crew running a limited number of active projects.
- Limited active projects
- Field capture, T&M tickets and signatures
- Change register, pricing and notices
- Notice clock and evidence packs
- Email, CSV and cloud-drive ingestion
The working plan for a subcontractor with real variation exposure.
- Everything in Growth
- Scope-to-field variance detection
- Accounting and project integrations
- Client approval portal
- Portfolio analytics and recovery forecasting
- Full audit chain and role-based commercial restrictions
Multi-office and joint-venture structures with their own systems.
- Everything in Pro
- SSO and SCIM provisioning
- ERP, scheduling and cost system connectors
- Regional hosting and retention controls
- Named support and implementation
For contractors who would rather hand the commercial work over, we can run the recovery cycle on your behalf. Percentage-based fees are only ever offered after legal, regulatory and attribution review — and only against work the detection engine actually surfaced, which is why origin is recorded on every change from the first minute.
A paid recovery sprint, not a pilot that goes nowhere.
We do not go past Release 0 until five contractors have given us real project data, three of them are paying, aggregate open variation value exceeds A$500,000 and two have accepted at least A$999 a month after a proven recovery. That gate is ours, not yours.
Paid recovery sprint
Project and scope import, mobile field events, T&M tickets and signatures, a manual change register, pricing, notices, a PDF evidence pack and the revenue dashboard — with concierge setup and a commercial review.
Sellable platform
Contract rule review, the notice clock, email and document ingestion, the client approval portal, accounting sync, roles, billing, advanced reports and the complete audit trail.
10x intelligence
Scope variance detection, drawing revision signals, the schedule impact workspace, project management integrations, recovery forecasting, portfolio benchmarks and enterprise SSO.
It does not determine legal entitlement, and it does not guarantee payment. It records the commercial position you take and the date you took it.
Jurisdictional and contract notice templates require qualified review before you rely on them. A rule built on an unapproved clause will not start a clock.
AI identifies and drafts. An authorised person approves every external notice, every price and every contractual assertion — nothing leaves the building on its own.
No unapproved change alters your source estimate, your contract or your accounting ledger. The platform is downstream of your systems of record, never on top of them.
Bring us one project and six months of open variations.
In a four to six week sprint we load the contract, put your crews on field capture, and work the register with you until a real change is recovered or materially accelerated. If nothing moves, you will know quickly and cheaply.