How to audit your construction software spend

Anything charged on a repeat that somebody logs into, plus the things sold alongside it. The reason the total surprises people is that it arrives in five places and only one of them looks like a software bill.

• Direct debits on the business account. The obvious ones, and usually less than half the money.
• Card payments. Smaller tools take a card rather than a mandate, so they never appear on the direct debit list at all.
• Subscriptions on the work phone. Anything bought inside an app is billed through the App Store or Google Play account, under a name nobody recognises on a statement.
• Annual invoices paid by bank transfer. A price book, a certification tool, a licence renewal. One payment, twelve months ago, and it looks like a supplier rather than a subscription.
• Personal cards claimed back on expenses. Common for storage, design tools and anything one person bought to get a job finished.

NoteTwo kinds of line look like software and are not. An employment law advice line or an insurance-backed service sold with an HR system is cover, not a login. A trade body or accreditation membership may be what keeps you on a client’s approved list. Mark both and set them aside before you start cutting.

In this order, with a spreadsheet open. The times are what it takes on a firm with ten or so lines to find.

1. 01Ten minutes. Download twelve months of transactions from the business account as a CSV and sort by description rather than by date. Everything that repeats lands in a block, and the blocks are your list.
2. 02Five minutes. Do the same for the business card. This is where the smaller tools sit, and they are the ones nobody remembers buying.
3. 03Two minutes. Open the subscriptions list in the App Store or Google Play account on the work phone.
4. 04Five minutes. Search the accounts package for suppliers paid over the same twelve months. The annual invoices show up here and almost nowhere else.
5. 05Three minutes. Add anything on a personal card that comes back through expenses.
6. 06Five minutes. Put each one on a single line: what leaves the account, what it does, how often, and the yearly figure excluding VAT. Compare everything net, because some vendors quote net and some quote gross.

The lines that get missed are the yearly ones. They appear once, eleven months ago, on a statement nobody is re-reading.

By the job the software does, not by the company that sends the invoice. Vendors sell bundles, so one direct debit can sit in two rows and two direct debits can sit in one. Grouping by job is what makes the second case visible.

Two payments in the same row is the finding. Either one of them is redundant, or each does half the job and somebody is typing the same information into both. The second one costs more than the subscription does.

Group by the job, not the vendor. A bundle that covers three rows badly still shows up as one line on the statement.

Six billing shapes cover almost everything sold to UK trades, and the headline price tells you very little until you know which one you are on.

NoteAnnual billing is the default view on many pricing pages, so the figure you remember may be the discounted one. Check the monthly rate and check the term you actually signed. Contracts in this market run for years as often as they run month to month, and a set-up fee is common on the ones sold by a salesperson.

Published list prices for the products a UK contractor usually ends up with, each read from the vendor’s own pricing page with the date beside it, are on the comparison pages. Use them to check what you are paying against what the same thing is advertised at, and expect a gap: what you pay was set on the day you signed.

Divide the yearly total, net of VAT, by the number of people who need a login. That is the number to write down, and the second one is the total as a share of turnover. Neither means much on its own. Both mean something once you have last year’s beside them.

There is no published benchmark for a small UK contractor that stands up to being quoted, so compare against yourself. The question a benchmark would answer is the wrong one anyway: a firm running everything through one system will show a higher cost a head on that line and a lower total than a firm running six cheap tools.

Then put the total where it belongs. Software is overhead, recovered across the hours you sell, and a firm that recovers overhead properly already has a place to put it. See how to price a job properly for the arithmetic that turns an annual overhead figure into a rate per productive hour.

Two numbers, once a year: what it costs a head, and what share of turnover it takes. Write them down, because next year’s audit is the one that pays.

Three questions per line. Anything that fails all three goes on the cancel list.

1. 01When did anybody last log in? Most systems will tell you on the people or admin screen. Read the last sign-in date rather than asking around, because people remember using things they have not opened since February.
2. 02Who would ring you if it stopped on Monday? If the answer is nobody, you have your answer.
3. 03What did we do before it, and what would we do instead? A tool that replaced nothing is a tool nobody will miss.

Two shapes turn up again and again. A licence still running for somebody who left, and a tool one person bought for one job and never opened again. Neither is carelessness. A leaver ends a payroll record, and nothing ends a login.

NoteBefore cancelling a tool that looks unused, check it is not running something quietly. Automatic backups, a mailbox, a domain renewal and a certificate store all look idle right up to the day they are needed.

A six-person groundworks and building firm, two in the office and four on site, turning over around £480,000. Half an hour with the statements produced this.

That is £4,162 a year, £694 a head, and a shade under 1% of turnover. None of the three existed before the half hour, and all three can be set against next year’s.

What the grouping turned up

• The estimating tool, £360 a year. Bought for a tender push eighteen months ago. Last opened fourteen months ago, by somebody who has since left. Cancel.
• The PDF markup licence, £264 a year. One person, one job, one set of drawings. Cancel, and use the viewer already on the tablet.
• Cloud storage, £180 a year. Holding site photographs the job app already stores against the job. The same job twice, so it goes once the old photographs are pulled across and checked.
• The HR app and the clocking app. Both hold the same staff list and two people type into both. Nothing to cancel this month, and a real decision to make at renewal.

The cancel list comes to £624 a year, or about £800 once the storage goes. That is a day and a half of a two-man gang, so nobody has been rescued by it. The hour a week somebody spends typing the same job into three systems is the bigger line, and it never appears on a bank statement at all.

Six checks, in this order. The first and the last are the ones that cost people money.

1. 01Get your data out first. Quotes, invoices, certificates, photographs, signed RAMS. Export while the account is live and open the file to check it is readable. Access normally ends when the term does, and a PDF of everything is better than a login you no longer have.
2. 02Check what the records are for. VAT records have to be kept for six years, and CIS records for at least three years after the end of the tax year they relate to. See CIS tax months and deadlines for how those years and months are counted. If the only copy lives in the thing you are cancelling, the export is not optional.
3. 03Check the term and the notice period. Rolling monthly is not the norm in this market. Fixed terms of a year or more are common, and cancelling mid-term usually leaves the balance payable.
4. 04Check the renewal date, and diarise it a month early. Refunds mostly do not exist. The renewal date is the only lever you have, and it is the one thing on the invoice nobody writes down.
5. 05Check who else logs in with it. A certificate app your gas engineer uses on site is not yours to cancel from the office without asking them.
6. 06Tell the bank last. Cancelling the direct debit does not cancel the contract. It turns a subscription you no longer want into a debt you still owe, and it puts the account in arrears while it is still holding your records.

NoteWhere a subscription carries an employment law advice line, health and safety consultancy or insurance backing, cancelling the software cancels the cover with it. Price the replacement before you cancel the bundle, and check whether a client contract or an accreditation scheme requires the cover you are dropping.

Estimark is one of these direct debits, and it gets the same test as the rest. It saves money when it takes rows off the list, and it costs money when it only adds one.

The rows it can take out are the job ones.

• Quoting and estimating with a price book, the job record from quote to warranty, invoices, scheduling, the site diary, variations, snagging and photographs against the job. On every plan, as one record rather than seven.
• RAMS with per-operative sign-off on the version they were actually shown, site inductions and toolbox talks with a signed attendance register. Included from Solo up.
• Timesheets, with QR clock-on at the site gate and the hours landing on the job. Included from Solo up.
• Staff records, holiday booking and documents against a person. Included from Pro up.
• Training and certification expiry, including CSCS cards. Included from Pro up.

Solo is £39 a month +VAT for up to 2 users. Core is £129 a month +VAT for up to 5 users, and Pro is £299 a month +VAT for up to 20 users, with extra people charged per seat on top. There is a 14-day free trial, so a like-for-like comparison against what you already pay can be done before anything is cancelled.

What it does not replace is the accounting half. It does not run payroll. It does not replace your accounts package: invoices push to Xero, QuickBooks and Sage Business Cloud Accounting, and the VAT return is prepared there. It does not file a CIS300 to HMRC on your behalf, and it records the return and locks it to its period instead. Your customers cannot pay by card or Direct Debit through Estimark, so invoices carry your bank details. Estimark holds no security certification: no ISO 27001, no SOC 2, no Cyber Essentials.

Prices and what sits on each plan are at Estimark pricing, and Estimark for builders and contractors is the page to read if you are pricing this against the list you have just written.