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Long-Scheme Construction Software (3+ Month Projects)

Construction Software For Long
Schemes (3+ Month Projects)

The problem:

A long scheme compounds everything that goes wrong on a short one. Month three is fine; by month seven variations have multiplied, retention is accruing in a spreadsheet, the programme has slipped against the baseline, and nobody can produce a credible WIP number because applications, POs, subbie costs and dayworks all live in different systems. Tools built for short-turnaround jobs lose context over eight months — the job ticket was never the right primitive. Enterprise platforms like Procore solve the problem but are priced and implemented for contractors ten times your size. Daily-diary and snagging point tools cover one workflow each but leave the application cycle, CIS and POs outside the system.

The fix:

Site Samurai is a single operating layer built for 3-to-12-month UK construction schemes at SME scale. Applications for Payment run the full project lifecycle with Construction Act 1996 s.111 Pay Less Notice tracking from certification date. Retention is tracked against Practical Completion and the Defects Liability Period. NEC early warnings, dayworks and variations are captured in the flow rather than after the fact. P6-style programme management carries critical path and baseline against actuals. CIS covers the subbie stack from HMRC verification through to the monthly CIS300. CDM 2015 Construction Phase Plans, RAMS and RIDDOR incidents live next to the project they belong to. Unlimited users on every plan from £99/month.

Last reviewed: 21 April 2026

TL;DR

Site Samurai is a single operating layer built for 3-to-12-month UK construction schemes at SME scale. Applications for Payment run the full project lifecycle with Construction Act 1996 s.111 Pay Less Notice tracking from certification date. Retention is tracked against Practical Completion and the Defects Liability Period. NEC early warnings, dayworks and variations are captured in the flow rather than after the fact. P6-style programme management carries critical path and baseline against actuals. CIS covers the subbie stack from HMRC verification through to the monthly CIS300. CDM 2015 Construction Phase Plans, RAMS and RIDDOR incidents live next to the project they belong to. Unlimited users on every plan from £99/month.

Audience

Who this is for

  • Directors, commercial managers and QSs at UK SME main contractors turning over £1m-£30m, running two to ten live schemes at a time.
  • Subcontractor principals — groundworks, M&E, fit-out, civils, cladding, joinery — whose typical package is three to twelve months under a main contractor's JCT 2016 or NEC4.
  • Contracts managers carrying the monthly valuation cycle, Pay Less Notice windows, retention, and variation registers across a portfolio of long-running projects.
  • Project managers and site agents who need a daily diary, RAMS, toolbox talks and RFI register that the commercial team can draw from for application and valuation.
  • Finance managers closing Xero or Sage monthly and needing WIP, committed cost and retention exposure without a week of reconstruction.
  • Owner-operators on their first or second scheme of more than six months who have discovered that spreadsheets, WhatsApp and a shared Dropbox do not scale past month four.
Disqualifiers

Who this is not for

  • Reactive service and FM businesses — if your average job is a day or a week, use Tradify, ServiceM8 or Workever, which are built around tickets.
  • Maintenance contractors on rolling planned-maintenance schedules — a CAFM tool will fit your work pattern better than a project-lifecycle tool.
  • Repeat-model housebuilders running identical plots where the commercial workflow is a standing purchase order rather than a monthly application — your workflow is closer to manufacturing than project construction.
  • Tier-1 main contractors running £500m+ portfolios with multiple simultaneous D&B schemes and dedicated BIM, integration and data teams — Procore or Asite will match your integration scale.
  • Teams looking for an accounting package. Site Samurai is a construction operating layer that syncs two-way with Xero and Sage; it does not replace them.
Where it hurts

Characteristic pains

Nine-month care-sector D&B scheme under JCT 2016 with monthly valuations, a £2.4m contract sum and four subcontract trades on site. Month six: variations sit at 14% of the contract sum and the last two applications went in late.

Variation register, dayworks and the application are in three different spreadsheets. The Pay Less Notice deadline has been missed once already, and nobody is tracking retention release against PC and DLP.

Twelve-month NEC4 highways sub-package. The project manager wants early warnings logged inside 7 days, a weekly programme update, and dayworks signed off daily before they are lost.

Early warnings get raised in email, dayworks go home on paper in a site engineer's notebook, and programme updates are a Monday-morning scramble that nobody has time to reconcile to the baseline.

Eight-month education refurb: you are bringing two new subcontractors on in month three, each needing HMRC CIS verification, insurance checks, RAMS review and a Construction Phase Plan briefing before they step on site.

Onboarding lives in a shared drive nobody owns. Insurances expire in month six and the first anyone notices is a principal contractor audit in month seven.

Six-month fit-out approaching Practical Completion with 120 snags across three floors, half the commissioning certificates still outstanding, and a hard handover date driven by the client's operational opening.

The snag list is an Excel the PM keeps mailing round. Close-out evidence lives on four different phones. Nobody can prove snag rundown against the contract terms when the client asks.

Year-end management accounts: three long schemes are mid-flight, one just hit PC, and the accountant wants a credible WIP number, retention exposure, and per-project P&L for the board.

WIP is reconstructed from four systems and a spreadsheet. Retention exposure is a best-guess. Per-project P&L is a week of office time, and the number that comes out is never quite the number the director expected.

Month four of an eight-month scheme: the main contractor's programme has slipped, your first-fix window has compressed, and labour cost is running ahead of the original tender rate assumptions.

You can feel the project is losing money but you cannot see it until the month-end accounts land — by which time two more weeks of labour have gone in at the wrong rate.

How Site Samurai handles it

Workflow mapping

Applications for Payment across the full project lifecycle

See workflow

Every monthly application rolls forward from the last: contract sum, variations, dayworks, retention deducted and certified value all carry through. The Construction Act 1996 s.111 Pay Less Notice window is calculated from certification date and flagged seven days out so nothing falls into deemed-payment territory.

Retention tracker to Practical Completion and Defects Liability

Retention deducted on each application is recorded against PC and DLP release dates. At the end of a twelve-month scheme you know, against every application, what is still due and when to invoice it.

NEC early warnings and dayworks

Early warnings are logged inside the contractual window with the concise statement and risk register entry. Dayworks are captured daily on the phone with labour, plant and material so they are not lost to a notebook at the end of the month.

P6-style programme with critical path and baseline (Professional plan)

Maintain the baseline from tender, mark the live programme against it, and see the critical path move as the scheme progresses. Programme slippage is visible in week four rather than month four.

CIS verification, deduction and CIS300 (Starter plan)

See workflow

Verify every subcontractor with HMRC, apply the returned rate automatically — 0% Gross Payment Status, 20% verified net or 30% unmatched — and generate the CIS300 from the same data that paid them. Re-verification cascades forward to unpaid amounts so an HMRC status change does not leave a miscalculated deduction on a certified line.

Subcontractor onboarding with insurance expiry monitoring

See workflow

Single pack per subbie: insurances, H&S declaration, RAMS review and CIS status. Expiring certificates surface on the dashboard before they lapse — not when a principal contractor audit catches them in month seven.

CDM 2015 Construction Phase Plans, RAMS and toolbox talks (Professional plan)

See workflow

Construction Phase Plans live next to the project. RAMS are built and digitally signed off by every operative before first engagement. Toolbox talks are delivered and signed on a phone with attendance against named operatives.

Site Diary, RFI register and snag/defect workflow

Daily log of labour, plant, deliveries, weather, progress photos and instructions received. RFIs are tracked with response dates. Snags are raised with photo and location, assigned, and closed out with evidence against Practical Completion.

Purchase Orders, GRNs, 3-way matching and supplier RFQs (Professional plan)

See workflow

POs against a project budget, goods receipted on site with photo evidence, and supplier invoices matched to PO and GRN before pay. Committed-cost visibility is against the project rather than buried in the accounts package.

Project P&L, WIP report and two-way Xero/Sage sync

Applications, variations, dayworks, subbie cost, POs and labour roll into a live per-project P&L. The WIP report (Enterprise, beta) gives finance a credible number for month-end without a week of spreadsheet reconstruction.

Incident reporting (RIDDOR) and policies with acknowledgement

See workflow

RIDDOR-reportable incidents are captured with photo evidence, escalation and sign-off. Company policies carry a digital acknowledgement trail against every operative on site.

UK regulatory nuance

UK long-scheme contracting — the regs and contract realities we handle

A UK construction scheme of three months or more sits inside a specific contractual and regulatory stack. JCT 2016 (Standard Building Contract, Design and Build, Intermediate) and NEC4 are the dominant parent contracts; each has its own notice regimes, certification windows and early-warning obligations. The Construction Act 1996 (HGCRA as amended), supported by the Scheme for Construction Contracts where the subcontract is silent, governs the s.111 Pay Less Notice window — miss it and the notified sum becomes the sum due. HMRC CIS applies to every payment to a subcontractor, with rates of 0%, 20% or 30% driven by verification status. CDM 2015 puts the Construction Phase Plan at the centre of principal-contractor compliance. RIDDOR captures the reportable-incident regime. Site Samurai is built around these primitives rather than bolted on top of a job-ticketing model.

JCT 2016 Standard Building ContractJCT 2016 Design and BuildNEC4Construction Act 1996 s.111HGCRA 1996Scheme for Construction ContractsHMRC CISCDM 2015RIDDORPractical CompletionDefects Liability Period
Pricing

Plans

14-day free trial, no card required. Unlimited users on every plan. Pricing is per organisation, not per head.

Starter

£99/month

Applications for Payment with s.111 tracking, CIS verification and deduction, subcontractor onboarding, site diary, toolbox talks, client portal.

See full plan

Professional

£199/month

Everything in Starter plus RAMS builder, CDM 2015 Construction Phase Plans, purchase orders with 3-way matching, NEC early warnings, dayworks, P6-style programme, Xero and Sage sync.

See full plan

Enterprise

£699/month

Everything in Professional plus unlimited AI RAMS and toolbox generation, voice-first site capture with offline queue, WIP and monthly management accounts, SSO/SAML, LazyQs AI contract review.

See full plan
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Three months or longer, with a monthly valuation cycle, a retention mechanism, variations and subcontract packages. That covers most JCT 2016 and NEC4 projects at SME scale — care homes, social housing refurbs, school refurbs, light industrial new-build, long fit-outs, and civils sub-packages — where the job ticket is the wrong primitive.
Procore and Buildertrend are excellent at the top end: Tier-1 main contractors with dedicated integration teams and nine-figure portfolios. Site Samurai is built for UK SMEs running schemes at £250k-£10m with two to ten projects live and no in-house BIM or data team. Pricing reflects that — unlimited users from £99/month rather than per-seat enterprise licensing.
Every application records certification date. From that date the Pay Less Notice deadline under the Construction Act 1996 (or the Scheme for Construction Contracts where the subcontract is silent) is calculated against the contract terms and surfaced on the dashboard. Seven days before the deadline it is flagged; when it expires without a notice the notified sum becomes the sum due, and the application moves to payable.
Yes. Retention deducted on each application is recorded with PC and DLP release dates. At the end of a long scheme you have a single view of what is due, against which application, and when to invoice it — instead of reconstructing it from twelve months of spreadsheets.
Yes, on Professional. Early warnings are logged inside the contractual window with the concise statement and risk register entry. Dayworks are captured daily on the phone with labour, plant and material so they are not lost to a site engineer's notebook at the end of the month.
A single pack per subbie: HMRC CIS verification, insurance checks with expiry monitoring, H&S declaration, RAMS review and CDM Construction Phase Plan briefing. The dashboard surfaces an insurance expiring in month six before the principal contractor catches it in month seven.
No. Every plan is unlimited users. Put the office team, site agents, QSs, PMs, operatives and subbies all on the system — pricing is per organisation, not per head, on Starter £99, Professional £199 and Enterprise £699 per month.
Yes. The project P&L rolls applications, variations, dayworks, POs, subbie cost and labour into a live number. On Enterprise the WIP report (beta) produces a board-ready WIP number. Two-way Xero and Sage sync keeps the accounts package in step without double-keying.
The snag and defect workflow captures items with photo and location, assigns them, tracks status, and closes them out with evidence. The close-out pack is produced from the same data the project P&L and the site diary draw from — not a printed spreadsheet that keeps getting re-emailed in the wrong version.
Yes — 14 days free, no card. Most SMEs are live on their next monthly application cycle: import projects, load CIS subcontractors, connect Xero or Sage, build the first RAMS. There is no implementation fee and no per-seat cost.
Related

Keep reading

Applications for Payment software

Monthly applications, variations, retention and Construction Act s.111 Pay Less Notice tracking across the project lifecycle.

Construction valuation software

Valuation workflow for QSs and commercial managers across long schemes.

CIS management software

HMRC verification, encrypted UTR/NI, automatic 0%/20%/30% deduction and the monthly CIS300 return.

Subcontractor onboarding software

Single pack per subbie with insurance expiry monitoring — expiring certificates surface before they lapse.

Construction RAMS software

RAMS builder with digital sign-off, Construction Phase Plans and CDM 2015 compliance.

Purchase order software

POs against project budgets, GRNs with photo evidence, and 3-way matching for committed-cost visibility.

Incident reporting software

RIDDOR-ready incident capture with CDM 2015 audit trail.

Tender management software

Subcontract tenders and bid levelling for the trade packages inside a long scheme.

Start your 14-day trial

Unlimited users on every plan. No card required. Live on your next application cycle.