Construction Audit
Construction audit services that catch the leak while the job is still open.
We encode the audit rules — committed costs against the subcontract, change-order pricing, pay-app math, retention, insurance and license terms — into a continuous AI audit that flags leakage before the check is cut.
Built with the leading AI platforms
NVIDIA
Anthropic
The broken Friday
The pay app clears. The contract never got consulted.
From project executives and controllers we have sat with: GCs, specialty subs, and PE-backed services businesses between $10M and $100M — dozens of open jobs, and nobody who can re-check every pay app against the contract.
Committed costs drift from the contract
The subcontract sets the rates; the pay apps arrive with different ones. Scope lines creep, unit prices wander from the executed agreement, and checking means opening the contract PDF next to every continuation sheet — which is to say, eventually.
Pay-app math nobody re-checks
Prior applications rolled forward wrong, stored materials billed without evidence, retainage computed on the wrong base. The continuation sheet runs forty lines, and the reviewer has six more waiting.
Change orders priced off-contract
The contract caps the markup on change-order work — labor, material, and equipment each with their own rate. Pricing happens from memory, and the signed change order becomes the new truth nobody goes back to audit.
Retention tracked in a side spreadsheet
Release conditions differ per contract and nobody checks them systematically. Retention goes out early to a friendly sub, or sits uncollected at closeout while someone reconstructs the job’s history by hand.
The insurance drawer nobody re-opens
The sub’s certificate of insurance was current at contract signing. Eight months into the job it isn’t — lapsed licenses, missing endorsements, additional-insured wording — and the audit trail is a filing cabinet.
What manual costs
The leakage is a line item, not a feeling — and it clears with the pay app.
The scale of the contractor organizations this manual checking holds together. Your numbers will differ — the two-week audit puts figures on yours before anything gets built.
From anonymized engagements — general contracting, specialty trades, PE-backed field services
How it works
We encode your audit rules.
No new system for your team to learn. The rules your best project executive carries in their head become the checks every pay app runs under.
- 01
Map the audit rules
We write down every rule a pay app gets judged by: committed costs against the subcontract, change-order markup caps, retention terms, stored-materials evidence, insurance and license requirements. Tribal knowledge becomes a rule set — yours to keep.
- 02
Encode the audit
Every pay application, change order, and compliance document gets read and checked against your rules, across every open job, before payment runs. Violations land in a review queue — your team approves exceptions, not every pay app.
- 03
Run it every cycle
The audit keeps pace with the billing calendar: over-billing flagged before the check is cut, retention released on the contract’s schedule, a variance report your controller actually reads.
A construction audit tells you what you lost. Encoded rules stop this month’s pay app.
The CPA firms auditing contractors today sell a retrospective project audit: one closed job, sampled transactions, a findings report months after the money left, billed by the hour. Construction auditing in that model tells you what you lost — and leaves the process that leaked it exactly as it found it.
We are not construction auditors in that sense. We encode the audit rules themselves — your subcontracts, your owner contracts, your retention and compliance terms — into a continuous AI audit inside the systems you already run. Every pay app checked, every open job, fixed fee, no percentage of recovery.
Led by Peter Enestrom.
Questions
Asked by project executives and controllers.
The straight answers, before you book anything.
What’s holding your business back?
A workflow ready for automation. An AI product you want to build. A problem that has sat on the roadmap for years. Let’s talk about what it would take to solve it.
Talk to Zaigo