Construction Audit01

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.

  • AI implementation services
  • Continuous audit across every open job
  • Your contract rules, encoded
  • Fixed fee — no percentage of recovery

Official services partner of the platforms defining AI

NVIDIAAnthropic
Peter Enestrom, founder of Zaigo

Every engagement is led personally by Peter Enestrom and the Zaigo AI & engineering team

YaleColumbia UniversityMicrosoft
The broken Friday01

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 costs02

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.

$10M–$100MRevenue range of the GCs and specialty subs checking pay apps against the contract by hand
40–50%Field accuracy of legacy OCR on the emailed PDFs pay apps and waivers arrive as
$100M+Specialty contractor whose change-order pricing rules lived in one person’s head

From anonymized engagements — general contracting, specialty trades, PE-backed field services

How it works03

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.

  1. 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.

    Weeks 1–2
  2. 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.

    Weeks 3–8
  3. 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.

    Every billing cycle
Not another firm

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.

In production
97–98%Field-level accuracy on emailed pay apps, waivers, and certificates, against a 40–50% OCR baseline
500Documents routed to human review out of every 5,000 processed
Two weeksFrom first read of your contracts to a working rule map and payback estimate
Peter Enestrom, founder of Zaigo
Who builds it

Led by Peter Enestrom.

Founder — leads AI & Engineering

Pete Enestrom

Every engagement is led personally by Pete, working with the Zaigo AI & engineering team from the two-week audit through the production handover. The person who scopes the work is the person who builds it.

Education
Yale & ColumbiaGraduate
Background
Microsoft & IntelFormer
Experience
Exited FounderVenture-Backed

Background

Questions04

Asked by project executives and controllers.

The straight answers, before you book anything.

A CPA firm’s construction audit is retrospective: it samples a closed job’s transactions, verifies costs against the contract months after the fact, and bills by the hour. Ours is continuous — the audit rules are encoded into your systems, so every pay application is checked against the contract before payment runs, on every open job. The CPA firm tells you what you lost; the encoded audit keeps you from losing it.

The leaks that clear manual review: subcontract billings above committed rates, change orders priced above the contract’s markup caps, pay-app math errors — stored materials without evidence, prior applications rolled forward wrong, retainage computed on the wrong base — retention released off-schedule, duplicate billings across cost codes, and subcontractors whose insurance or license lapsed mid-job.

No. We do not opine on your financial statements, and nothing here replaces your CPA. This is an operational audit layer: your contract terms, encoded as checks that run inside the systems you already use. Your auditors get cleaner jobs to look at; you keep the findings.

Read access to your accounting suite and pay-app history, your owner contracts and subcontracts with addenda, and two hours a week with whoever knows the exceptions. The two-week audit produces the rule map and the payback estimate before you commit to a build.

The two-week audit is a fixed fee, credited toward the build if you continue. Builds are scoped per workflow with a payback estimate up front — fixed fee, no percentage of recovery, no per-seat license. You are never paying us a share of your own money.

You do. The rule set is documented and handed over, and anything we built keeps running. There is no lock-in designed into the work.

The suite holds the ledger and the forms; it does not hold your rules — this owner’s retention cap, that subcontract’s markup terms, the addendum that changed the rates. Encoding those rules is the work; the suite is where they run.

Start with one workflow.

Tell us where your team loses hours. We will come back with a straight answer on whether AI can help, what it would take, and what it would pay.