Consulting Practice handbook

ConstruC was built for firms that build. A consultancy uses the same engine and a different ledger:

• You issue, you do not execute. Your product is documents — instructions, variations, certificates, responses, reports. What leaves your office IS the job.
• You certify money that is not yours. The contractor's account records what they are entitled to. None of it ever touches your books.
• Your money is the fee, earned by completing work stages and billed to your client.
• Your site record is observation, not control. You visit, you photograph, you write down what you saw. You do not man the site or buy the materials.

Because of that, whole parts of the platform are switched off for you and will not appear: procurement, the site module, and plant. They are not missing and they are not locked behind a price — they belong to whoever is building.

The one idea to hold onto. Everything you do is evidence for a conversation that has not happened yet. Write the note as though somebody will read it in two years with money at stake, because that is exactly who reads it.

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At firm creation you chose Consultant and ticked your disciplines. That choice decides two things:

• Which departments you get. Architecture or engineering seeds Design; quantity surveying seeds QS; project management seeds Design too, because the drawing register, RFIs and submittals are what a PM administers. Every practice gets Project management and Finance.
• Which modules you see. An architecture practice never opens a bill of quantities, so measurement is switched off. A cost consultancy keeps it.

You can change both later in Firm settings → Firm type. Nothing is deleted when you do — departments are added, never removed.

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FIG 3.1 — the loop a practice actually runs. Note where the two moneys sit: you certify at C and you are paid at F, and they are never the same number.

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Your appointment is structured by work stages, not by a programme of trades. Apply RIBA Plan of Work 2020 or AIA phases to a project and you get the full set; rename, reschedule or reweight anything afterwards.

A stage carries a fee share — a percentage or an amount. That is what makes a stage worth something: mark it complete and the fee it carries becomes earned, and therefore billable. This is the single most useful piece of housekeeping in the product, and the one most often skipped.

Where: Project → Stages.

Set the fee share when you apply the set, not when you come to invoice. A stage marked complete with no fee against it earns nothing and quietly under-bills you.

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The contractor, the employer, the co-consultants and the sub-contractors are not users of ConstruC. They never log in. So the practice keeps a directory of external organisations and their contacts, and names them on the documents it addresses.

Where: Firm settings → Directory (the firm's address book), and Project → Parties (who is who on this job).

The directory is deliberately shared ground rather than a consultant-only feature — a contractor running a subcontract package picks bidders from the same list.

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The register is the point of the whole product. It holds fourteen kinds of document, and three rules hold it together.

Numbered at issue. A reference — AI-0014, VO-0007, IPC-0003 — is allocated the moment a document goes out, atomically, so the series has no gaps. A draft has no number, which is also what makes "has this gone out?" answerable from one column.

Frozen once issued. No editing path touches an issued document. Correcting one means issuing a revision that supersedes it, and both stay readable. AI-0014 Rev 1 is plainly the same instruction.

Recipients are a snapshot. Names and addresses are copied at issue, not read through the directory afterwards. Fixing a contact next year must not rewrite who a certificate was addressed to eighteen months ago.

FIG 6.1 — the only three states, and the only two moves between them.

Where: Project → Register.

The document calls itself what the contract calls it

Ghana and most of West Africa run on FIDIC; the JCT tradition is the alternative. The same instrument has different names in each, and getting it wrong makes a document look amateur to the person receiving it:

The form is frozen onto the document at issue, so changing your firm's default later cannot retitle something already sent.

Drafting with AI

Draft with AI writes the body for you from a few notes. It is given the contract vocabulary above, the project's real parties, the work stage, and your firm's own style notes from Firm settings → Templates & branding — so it sounds like your practice rather than like generic professional English.

Two things it will not do. It never invents a figure: money, dates and clause numbers come back as [amount] and [date] placeholders for you to fill. And it drafts, it never issues — you read it, edit it, and create the draft yourself, and issuing is still a separate, heavier permission after that.

Record your house style once, in Templates & branding. One paragraph about how your practice writes changes every document the AI drafts from then on.

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You visit; you do not run the site. The record has four parts and each answers a different question.

Visits. What you saw, when. Weather at three points of the day — which is what makes it usable later — plus progress observed, matters noted, and, separately, what the weather stopped. A weather note on its own proves very little; tied to the activity it halted, it becomes evidence.

Materials on site. What has been delivered but not yet built in. Under the RICS admission limbs a material is only worth certifying if it can be shown to be on site, properly stored and identifiable as this contract's — and if the supplier has not retained title. Each line is checked against those limbs per period; a line that fails is not certified, and the register tells you why.

Client materials (free issue). Where your client buys the materials and a gang supplies the labour. The reconciliation is ΣA − (ΣB + Σb + ΣC + ΣD): supplied, less built in, less agreed wastage, less work in progress, less what is still in the store. What remains is unaccounted for.

Client money. Cash the client released, what it was for, and the proof it moved.

Every one of these takes photographs and video, attached as you write the note. The server stamps its own timestamp and computes a SHA-256 hash of the stored file: EXIF is editable with free tools and AI-generated imagery is now an active authenticity attack, so what the server recorded is kept strictly apart from what the device declared.

Where: Project → Site record.

Photograph as you write, not afterwards. A note with a picture is worth several times a note without, and the photograph that gets taken later is the one that never gets taken.

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This is where you administer somebody else's contract.

FIG 8.1 — and the gap between the application and the valuation is the conversation. The platform keeps both numbers so the difference is visible rather than argued from memory.

Materials on site are pulled into a valuation from the register in section 7, not typed in — so the figure that reaches a certificate is one somebody physically verified against the admission limbs. Typing it by hand would let an unchecked or title-encumbered line into the money by accident.

A certificate is an issued document, so it takes a number from the same gapless series and freezes on issue. Correcting one means superseding it.

None of this touches your practice's books. It is the client's money and the contractor's entitlement, and ConstruC keeps it strictly separate from your own ledger.

Where: Project → Contract account.

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Your income, and the only money on the platform that is yours.

• Appointed fee — fixed, or a percentage of construction cost. A percentage appointment is derived from the cost as it moves, and capped absolutely if you set a maximum: a cost overrun on the building is not a reason to exceed the fee your client agreed.
• Earned — the fee share of every stage marked complete.
• Invoiced — what you have actually billed.
• Billable now — earned less invoiced. The number to act on this week.
• WIP — time logged that no stage has yet earned. Not billable, and confusing it with the above is how a practice bills for work it cannot justify.

Log time against projects to get utilisation and WIP; set rates by grade or by person, effective-dated, so last year's timesheets are not re-rated when this year's rates go up.

Where: Project → Fees, and Firm settings → Practice for rates, time and utilisation across the whole book.

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Putting a package out and levelling what comes back: levelled = submitted + arithmetic correction + adjustments. Corrections and adjustments are kept apart from the submitted figure, because the basis of a change is what gets challenged far more often than the arithmetic.

Tenders belong to a project, not to the firm — priced off its bill, judged against its estimate, awarded into its contract.

Where: Project → Tenders.

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Every department's AI agent at a practice can see your own work: stages, the register, the contract account, fees and the site record. It knows the distinction that matters — ask it what you have earned and it reads your fee, not the contractor's account.

It will also tell you a document is still a draft rather than counting it as sent, and when a material has not been admitted into a valuation it gives you the reason, because an uncertified line without its reason is useless to somebody who has to justify a certificate.

Where: ConstruC AI, in any project or firm-wide.

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Same prices, same storage, same everything as a firm that builds. Only the project cap differs, because the unit of work does:

A contractor on Pro is running one job and living in it all week; a practice on the same plan is advising on several at once.

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The working discipline

1. Weight the stages when you apply the set, not when you invoice.
2. Photograph as you write, on every visit and every delivery.
3. Say what the weather stopped, not just what the weather was.
4. Check materials against the limbs before they reach a certificate.
5. Draft, read, then issue. Issuing is the one-way door.
6. Never read the contract account as your income. Your money is the fee.

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This handbook describes ConstruC as a consulting practice sees it. Where a screen says a module is not part of a consultancy, that is the platform being explicit that the work belongs to whoever is building.