Allconstruct: Where AI Fits

Your stack today

Procore is the heartbeat. The amber line is the bit driving you mad.

Everything runs through Procore, and it works. The problem is what happens before a job gets there, and the email that never gets there at all.

Tender to purchase order, today

Today: the tender is finished in Excel and Bluebeam, then every line is typed again into Procore to raise 50 to 70 purchase orders. Gmail sits on its own island. Six months of a tender trail lives in there and nothing else can see it.

"Everything seems to be handled two or three times, and it's driving me mad."

You, on tendering in Excel and Bluebeam, then re-keying it all into Procore

"A lot of the time she doesn't know exactly what I'm building because she's at home. She's asking, what's this, what's that."

On Ru running the operating system without a way to look things up herself

"Then he'll be searching through emails, saying, where was that, where was this."

On Anthony running a six-month tender trail out of Gmail

"If something is too hard, we're doing something wrong."

The line I'd put on the wall

What I heard

Correct me where I've got it wrong.

This is the picture I'm scoping against. Some of it is from our call, some from your website. Hit Not quite on anything that's off and tell me what's right.

The business

Carpentry and interiors subcontractor: internal partitions, ceiling linings, carpentry, external cladding, truss roofs, plastering, aluminium. Aged care, schools, apartments, mixed-use towers, government. Packages of around $8M on $80M to $100M jobs, roughly 10% of project value, under Tier 2 head contractors. FKG is the big one (Manly Aged Care, $7.1M, running now), with Kane, ADCO, Stokes Wheeler and McNab around it. The 190-bed Ascot aged care job with Balmain and Co, $7.5M, awarded last month. A licensed labour hire division alongside. The current company dates from June 2022, but the track record goes back to 2014.

Overhead team

Five. Eamus (director, on site, the glue). Ru (civil engineer, runs the operating system from home, effectively CFO). Anthony (design, estimating and HSE, runs tenders, Sydney). Dan (site). Jared (site). Everyone else sits on a cost code.

Labour

About 60% hourly employees, 40% subcontractors. Both sign into a purchase order in the Procore app. Hours track to cost codes to the hour and flow through to payslips in Xero.

Volume

10 to 15 tenders a year, all large. 50 to 70 purchase orders on a single job. Six months of work can hang off one tender.

Procore

About $27,000 a year for Project Management and Financials. Timesheets, POs, cost tracking, safety folders. Considering adding Procore Estimating at roughly $12,000 a year.

Email

Gmail. 136,000 unopened in your inbox. Anthony and Ru carry most of it. Tender email trails are where things get lost.

Other tools

A docket scanner that reads receipts with AI, paid monthly. Smartsheet, linked to something, purpose to confirm. SWMS and safety documents printed and kept as hard copies on site.

What you want

Hours back for Ru and Anthony. Ru able to ask "what's this" without ringing you. Tender-to-PO without triple handling. Your data feeding your own company brain, something like NotebookLM but yours. And a straight answer on whether you keep paying Procore forever.

What Procore actually does

The full map, marked against what you're using.

You asked whether the whole company could run through Procore. Here's everything they sell. Procore is a US$1.3 billion a year company that spent US$362 million on engineering last year. Nobody clones it. The aim is to own the handful of workflows that matter to a Queensland interiors subbie and leave Procore doing what it does well.

Preconstruction Not using · the $12k question

Estimating and 2D/3D take-off from drawings with a cost catalogue. Accepted estimates flow into the project budget and commitments. This is what the extra $12k buys.
Tender management: packages, bidder lists, invitations, addenda, bidder questions, coverage tracking, automated levelling, award.
Prequalification of subcontractors: insurance, financials, safety.
Bid board and pipeline.

Honest take. Procore Estimating solves estimate-to-budget-to-PO inside Procore. It does not touch the email trail, the RFQ chasing, or the "where was that" problem, and your estimating history stays in their system. Worth deciding after Phase 1, not before.

Project execution Using · core of what you pay for

Drawings with automatic sheet splitting, revision control and comparison, markup, offline on mobile.
Documents and folders with permissions and versioning. Your safety folders live here.
RFIs, submittals, correspondence, transmittals, meetings, tasks.
Daily log and site diary. Photos and video, including 360-degree photos pinned to drawings.
Defect lists, observations, inspections from templates, incidents, configurable forms.
Schedule, with links to MS Project and Primavera P6. BIM viewing and coordination.

Worth checking together: how much of this your team actually opens in a week. Most firms your size use the drawings, the folders and the diary and leave the rest.

Financials Using · the part that's hard to leave

Budget by cost code: original, revised, committed, pending, invoiced, paid, forecast to complete, forecast final.
Head contract and commitments (your 50 to 70 POs per job).
Change events and variations, flowing through to budget and forecast.
Progress claims and subcontractor invoicing against the schedule of values.
Xero integration. Procore Pay and lien waivers (US-centric).

Leave this alone longest. The PO-to-timesheet-to-payslip chain works. Don't break what works.

Resource management Using part · timesheets live here

Timecards and timesheets, workers signing into a PO, hours against cost codes.
Crew and workforce planning across jobs. A new AI feature called SmartBench ranks available workers by skills, availability and distance.
Equipment register, materials tracking, labour productivity against the original estimate.

Procore AI and Digital Coworkers Not using · new, worth knowing

Procore bought an AI company called Datagrid in January and started shipping agents in May. In July they packaged them:

Starter Pack: a six-month trial on up to three projects with five agents. Deep Search across drawings and specs, Submittal Review, RFI drafting, Site Diary from voice and photos, Contract Review. There's a specialty contractor version.
Pro: twenty agents, unlimited projects, paid by credits each month. Includes Tender Analyser and Tender Levelling.
Enterprise: build your own agents in Agent Studio.
Procore Skills, rolling out from August: upload your SOPs and the agents follow them.

Why it matters. The "what's this" search Ru needs is something Procore now sells. Two catches. It only knows what's inside Procore, so the 136,000 emails and the Excel tenders are invisible to it. And it's their brain, not yours: when you stop paying, it stops knowing. That's the fork in the road, further down this page.

They've also just agreed to buy DroneDeploy for US$845 million. Drones and site cameras feeding AI. Not relevant to you today, but it tells you where they're pointed: towards big builders with big budgets.

What Procore doesn't do for you The gaps

Read your email. Anything that happens in Gmail is invisible to it.
Security of Payment. Queensland claim clocks, payment schedules, reference dates, retention and bank guarantees. Procore is generic here.
Keep your estimating history as yours. Priced versus actual across every job is the most valuable data in the business, and it's in Excel.
Labour hire compliance. Licences, tickets, inductions, insurance expiry across a mixed employee and subbie workforce under your labour hire licence.
Subcontractor scorecards. Who tenders cheap and then generates variations. Who's late on every RFI. Who you should never use again.
Get cheaper as AI gets better. Their price goes up every year regardless.

What we could build

Three phases. The first is small and lands in weeks.

Each phase should pay for itself before the next starts. Open What it looks like on a Tuesday on any card to see the day-to-day version. Then mark every card.

1

Quick wins

Weeks, not months.
Nothing in Procore changes.

Excel to Procore in one step

3 to 5 weeks

You finish the tender in Excel and Bluebeam the way you do now. When you win, one action reads the estimate and creates the budget lines and the 50 to 70 purchase orders in Procore, ready for Ru to check and issue. No re-typing. This is the amber line on the diagram, and it's the one I'd do first.

Who gets hours back: Ru. Days per job, not hours.

Plugs into: Procore's API for commitments and budget. Needs your estimate template to be consistent job to job, which we'd tidy together. Also removes the main reason to spend $12k a year on Procore Estimating.

What it looks like on a Tuesday

Ru opens the won tender's spreadsheet, presses one button, and sees a table: each estimate line matched to a cost code and a subbie, with anything uncertain flagged in amber. She fixes the two or three flagged lines, presses Create, and 60 draft purchase orders appear in Procore ready to issue. Nothing goes live until she says so.

What I need from you

Three or four recent tender spreadsheets and the POs that came out of them.
Read-only access to your Procore, then read-write once you've watched it work.

The risk

If every tender spreadsheet is laid out differently, we spend the first week agreeing a template. That's still worth it.

Your question or note for TysonSaved

The company brain

2 to 4 weeks

A private version of the NotebookLM idea you liked, but pointed at everything: the Procore project folders, the drawings, the tender spreadsheets, the emails that matter. Anyone in the team types "what's the ceiling spec on Level 3 east" or "what did we quote for the Manly balustrades" and gets an answer with a link to the exact document it came from. It never makes things up, because it only knows what you've given it.

Who gets hours back: Ru first. She stops ringing you and Anthony. Then Anthony during tenders.

Plugs into: Procore (read only, through their API), Google Drive, Gmail. Runs on a small server in an Australian data centre, about $150 a month. Your data stays on it.

What it looks like on a Tuesday

Ru is at home. She types "what fire rating is the corridor ceiling on the aged care job" and gets a two-line answer with a link to the exact page of the spec. She clicks through, confirms it, and moves on. No phone call.

What I need from you

A Google account with access to the shared drive and the mailboxes you want included.
A decision on whose email is in scope. I'd start with the tenders mailbox, not everyone's personal inbox.

The risk

If the documents are messy, the answers are only as good as the documents. The first fortnight is mostly tidying.

Your question or note for TysonSaved

Email sorted behind your eyes

2 to 3 weeks

An assistant that reads incoming email for you, Ru and Anthony, works out which job or tender each one belongs to, files it, and pulls out anything that needs doing. Each morning you get a short list: three things to reply to, two subbies you haven't heard back from, one quote that's landed. The 136,000 backlog gets triaged in one pass, not read.

Who gets hours back: Anthony most. Then you, because your inbox stops being a place things go to die.

Plugs into: Gmail. Feeds the company brain. Nothing gets sent without a human pressing the button.

What it looks like on a Tuesday

7am. Anthony's phone shows: "Plasterboard quote from Knauf landed for the school job, $184k, 3% over last time. Two subbies on the aged care RFQ haven't replied in six days. The architect answered RFI 14." Each line links to the email. Replies are drafted, not sent.

What I need from you

Whether your Gmail is a Google Workspace business account or personal Gmail. It changes how it connects.
A list of live jobs and tenders so it knows what to file against.

Your question or note for TysonSaved

2

Give the team their hours back

One to three months each.
Built on Phase 1.

The tender workbench

2 to 3 months

One place for a tender from the day it lands to the day it's awarded. Drawings and specs in, scope broken into packages, RFQs out to subbies with a record of who's been asked and who's replied, quotes coming back and filed against the right package, a levelling table that lines up three plasterboard quotes side by side, and the final estimate ready to push into Procore. Every email Anthony currently hunts for is already attached to the tender it belongs to.

Who gets hours back: Anthony, on every one of the 10 to 15 tenders a year. This is where six months of work gets won or lost.

Plugs into: Gmail, the company brain, the Excel-to-Procore bridge. Over time it becomes your estimating history: what you priced, what it actually cost, which subbies came in where.

What it looks like on a Tuesday

A new tender lands from FKG. Anthony drops the drawings and spec in. The workbench splits the scope into your usual packages, drafts the RFQ emails to your usual subbies, and shows a board: sent, opened, replied, quoted. When three plasterboard quotes come back they sit side by side with the differences highlighted. On award, the estimate goes to Procore through the bridge.

The question that decides how good this gets

Do you have old jobs in Excel with what was priced and what it actually cost? Even five or six. Without that history it's a very good filing system. With it, it starts pricing.

Your question or note for TysonSaved

Everyone's daily list, written for them

3 to 6 weeks

The thing I showed Charlie. You open your phone in the morning and the day is laid out: the RFI that's been sitting with the architect for nine days, the PO Ru still hasn't issued, the subbie whose insurance expires Friday, the claim due Tuesday. Five people, five lists, all pulled from Procore and email without anyone typing a task.

Who gets hours back: everyone, but mostly it stops things falling through the cracks between site and home.

Plugs into: Procore, Gmail, the company brain.

Your question or note for TysonSaved

Site diary by voice

3 to 4 weeks

You or Dan walk the site talking into your phone. "Twelve chippies on today, Level 2 ceilings continued, two hours lost waiting on plasterboard, riser clash photographed on Level 3 east." It comes out as a proper diary entry in Procore with the photos attached and the delay flagged, ready for you to check and submit. Procore sells this themselves now. We can do it pointed at your own brain.

Who gets hours back: you and Dan, twenty minutes a day each, and the diary actually gets done.

Plugs into: Procore daily log.

Your question or note for TysonSaved

Compliance watch

4 to 6 weeks

One register for every worker and subbie: white cards, licences, inductions, SWMS sign-offs, insurance certificates, with expiry dates. It warns the subbie thirty days out, warns you at fourteen, and flags anyone signing into a PO who shouldn't be. Built around what QBCC and your labour hire licence actually require, not a generic safety module.

Who gets hours back: Anthony on HSE, and you stop finding out on site.

Plugs into: Procore directory and timesheets. Could replace the printed hard copies with a QR code on the site board.

Your question or note for TysonSaved

3

Your own operating layer

Six months plus.
Only if Phases 1 and 2 have earned it.

Variations and claims, done properly

3 to 4 months

A site instruction or drawing change gets captured the day it happens, priced, turned into a variation, and lands in the next progress claim with the Queensland Security of Payment clock running. Every variation remembers where it came from: the drawing revision, the RFI, the email. When a builder argues, you have the chain. Procore is generic here and it's where subbies eat money.

What it's really about: less about hours, more about the variations you currently don't get paid for.

Plugs into: Procore change events and claims, or replaces them if it works better.

Your question or note for TysonSaved

Your cost history and subbie scorecards

Grows from Phase 2

Every job you've done, priced against what it actually cost, by trade and by subbie. Ask it "what does aged care ceiling framing cost us per square metre" and get your number, not a catalogue's. Ask "which electrical subbies have we used under $2M and how did they go" and get a ranked list with variation rates and defect counts. This is the data Procore Estimating would collect for them. Better it collects for you.

Who gets hours back: Anthony pricing faster and sharper. You choosing subbies on evidence.

Plugs into: the tender workbench, Procore actuals, Xero.

Your question or note for TysonSaved

Take modules off Procore one at a time

Ongoing, your call each time

Once the brain, the tender workbench and the variations engine are habit, you'll find you're opening Procore for fewer things. At that point each module is a separate decision: does the $27k still buy something we can't do ourselves? Timesheets to payslips is probably the last to go, because it works and payroll is not where you want surprises. Drawings might go early, because Bluebeam already does the markup. Nothing gets ripped out on a whim.

What it's really about: in three years your system knows more about your business than Procore ever will, and it got smarter every time the AI behind it did, without a price rise.

Depends on: everything above being used every day, not just built.

Your question or note for TysonSaved

Procore's brain or yours

The straight version of the question you asked.

Neither answer is wrong. They lead to different places.

	Stay all-in on Procore, add Estimating and their AI	Keep Procore for now, build your own layer around it
Day to day	One vendor, one login, one support line. Their agents answer questions about what's in Procore. Estimating flows to budget to PO inside the system.	Procore keeps doing POs, timesheets and payroll. Your layer handles email, tenders, search and the daily list. Two systems, one brain.
Cost	About $27k plus $12k for Estimating plus an AI package on top, with credits after the trial. Rises with your turnover and every renewal.	About $150 a month to run, plus the build. Gets cheaper and smarter as AI does. No per-turnover pricing.
Your emails and Excel history	Invisible. Procore's AI only sees Procore.	The whole point. Everything feeds one place.
Who owns the data	You can export it, but the intelligence built on top is theirs. Stop paying and the brain forgets.	It sits on your server in an Australian data centre. The intelligence is yours. It compounds year on year.
Risk	Low. It's Procore. It works. You just pay more every year for a system built for builders ten times your size.	Someone has to own it and keep it running. That's the honest cost, and it's a real one.
In three years	A very good Procore setup, and a bill that has gone up three times.	Your system knows your subbies, your rates, your jobs and your way of working. Some Procore modules have quietly fallen away.
In ten years	Still a customer.	An operating system nobody else has. Possibly one other subbies would pay to use.

My recommendation, for what it's worth: hold off on Procore Estimating for two months. Do Phase 1. Then decide with real information whether $12k a year buys anything the bridge doesn't.

Who owns it

You own it, it lives in your name, and you can walk away with everything.

The question that usually comes second: if you build it, who owns it, where does it live, and what happens if we stop working together?

The codeA private code repository in your company's name with everything I write. Not a licence. Yours.

The serverA cloud server in Sydney on an account registered to Allconstruct Interiors, billed to your card. You hold the master login.

The keysEvery password and connection in a password vault that belongs to you. Revoke my access in one click.

The manualA plain-English document per system: what it does, how to restart it, how to back it up, who to call.

Your dataNever leaves your server. The AI reads it to answer questions. It doesn't keep a copy and isn't trained on it.

What if Tyson gets hit by a bus?

Your business keeps running. Nothing sits on a server I control, not even during the build. The code is in your repository, the keys are in your vault, and the manual is written so a capable person with no coding background can restart, back up and monitor it. Anthony or Ru could do it. Any competent developer can pick it up from there.

Where does it actually live?

On Amazon Web Services in Sydney, the same infrastructure most Australian software companies use. Backups run nightly to a second location. If the machine fails, it's rebuilt from backup in under an hour. Running costs are about $150 a month for everything in Phases 1 and 2, paid by you directly to the hosting provider. I don't mark them up.

If you'd rather run it on a box in your own office, that's possible. I don't recommend it: a Mac Mini in a site office is one theft or one flood away from a bad week.

Is our data safe? Does the AI learn from it?

The AI reads your documents to answer a question and gives the answer back with a link to where it came from. It doesn't keep a copy and it isn't trained on your data. The same permission rules apply as in Procore: a subbie's foreman can't ask the brain about the commercial position. And nothing gets sent, issued or paid without a person pressing the button. That's a design rule, not a setting.

Do we have to change how we work?

No. Phase 1 is built around what you do now: Excel and Bluebeam for tenders, Procore for POs, Gmail for email. The bridge reads your spreadsheet, it doesn't replace it. The only thing I'll ask is that the tender template is consistent from job to job, and we'd tidy that together.

What does it cost?

Two parts, agreed per phase. The build is a fixed price quoted once the phase scope is signed off. No hourly surprises. Running costs go straight from you to the hosting provider. Ongoing support after handover, if you want it, is a separate conversation and a modest monthly amount. It's optional. The systems don't stop working if you don't take it.

What happens if it doesn't save hours?

We stop and I tell you so. Every phase ends with measuring hours saved, honestly. Phase 1 is deliberately small so that if it isn't working, you've lost weeks, not months.

What won't Tyson do?

Put your data on my infrastructure, ever, including during the build.
Sign you up to a stack of monthly subscriptions and wire them together. If I can build it, I build it.
Touch payroll or anything that moves money without you watching the first run.
Build things nobody's asked for. Every piece traces back to a card on this page you marked Keep.

How it would run

Scope, build, deploy, sit beside, hand over.

Every phase runs the same way. I write and test it. Anything touching Procore or Xero is built against a sandbox first, then your live system read-only, then read-write once you've watched it work.

This week

You mark up this page. We talk for twenty minutes with your shortlist in front of us.

Tuesday 8 September, Gold Coast

I sit next to Ru for an hour and watch a PO get raised from an Excel tender, start to finish. I'll ask why at every step and it will be annoying. It's also the reason the thing will fit the way you actually work.

Week 2

Sandbox access to Procore. Read-only to start. A written scope for Phase 1 with what you get, when, and what it costs, on one page.

Weeks 3 to 8

Phase 1 built and in daily use. I sit with whoever uses it most and fix what's clunky before we call it done. Then we measure hours saved, honestly.

Month 3

Decision point. Procore Estimating or the tender workbench. Which Phase 2 pieces, in what order.

Month 6 onward

Phase 3 only if the team is actually living in what we built. Motivation runs on results, not promises.

Things I need from you

Tick what you can answer now. The rest we'll cover Tuesday.

Do you have old jobs in Excel with what was priced and what it actually cost? Even five or six.

This decides how good the cost history can be.

What is Smartsheet doing for you, and what's the docket scanner called?

I want to know what to keep and what to fold in.

Is your Gmail on a Google Workspace business account, or personal Gmail?

Changes how the email assistant connects.

Which head contractors' portals do you have to feed claims and ITPs into, and in what format?

FKG, Kane, ADCO, Balmain and Co, McNab I know of.

Who in the team is the sceptic?

I'd rather build for them first.

Rough budget range for Phase 1.

I'm not asking for a number today, just whether we're talking a few thousand or a lot more, so I scope to fit.

Any client contracts that say where your project data can and can't sit?

Government jobs sometimes do, even under the builder's umbrella.

An hour with Ru, at her screen, before Phase 1 starts.

That hour is worth more than any document in this folder.

One last thing. We are still scoping. Neither of us has committed to anything, and no price on this page is a quote until a phase is written up on one page and signed off. This scope is yours whatever happens. If we don't end up working together, hand it to whoever you like.

Tyson Whitewood · Eden Commercial Pty Ltd · Aratula, Queensland · tyson@edencommercial.au