Key Results
- Reporting time cut from 14 hours to under 3 hours per week
- Management pack delivered Monday 7am, current to Friday close
- Cost definition disputes eliminated across the commercial team
The Challenge: Reporting Without Construction Reporting Automation
A main contractor running eight to twelve live projects across commercial fit-out, light industrial, and education sectors had a reporting problem that nobody had properly named. With no construction reporting automation in place, one person carried the entire management pack on his own time.
Every Thursday afternoon, the Commercial Director cleared his diary to build it. First, he pulled figures manually from Procore and Sage, plus three project-specific spreadsheets. Then he reconciled the numbers wherever the systems disagreed. Finally, he produced a consolidated view that the MD could use to make resourcing and investment decisions.
By Friday, however, when the pack finally went out, parts of it had already aged five days.
Both the MD and the Commercial Director knew this. The real problem, though, was that nobody could explain why the pack took fourteen hours to build, or whether the resulting figures actually held up. In other words, the team simply assumed the numbers were roughly right — and nobody had ever tested that assumption.
By Friday, however, when the pack finally went out, parts of it had already aged five days.
The Approach: Why Automation Alone Fixes Nothing
Severus started where the problem actually sat — not with the reporting tool, but with the data feeding it.
Step 1: Map the reporting workflow from source to distribution
First, we traced every data input: who entered it, when, into which system, and what assumptions they made whenever the systems disagreed. Building the map took two days. As a result, three distinct problems surfaced, and no reporting tool could solve any of them on its own.
Step 2: Fix the underlying data issues
Project cost coding varied across Procore, because each project manager categorised the same cost type differently. In addition, the Sage chart of accounts did not align with the project structure in Procore, which is why every reconciliation demanded manual judgement. Worse still, the commercial team shared no agreed definition of “committed cost” — so two people using the same term were measuring different things.
Therefore, we fixed all three before touching automation. This is the step most technology vendors skip, and it is why so much construction reporting automation fails to survive contact with a live portfolio.
Step 3: Build the automated reporting layer.
Once the data held together and the team had agreed the definitions, the automation itself proved straightforward. A scheduled process now pulls from Procore and Sage every Friday evening, applies the agreed cost definitions, and delivers the management pack to the distribution list by 7am on Monday.
No manual compilation. No Thursday afternoon cleared. No five-day-old figures dressed up as current.
The Results of Construction Reporting Automation
Reporting time dropped from fourteen hours per week to under three. Moreover, the remaining hours now go on exception review and commercial judgement rather than on data assembly.
Every Monday morning, the distribution list receives a management pack that runs current to Friday close of business. As a result, the MD finally has a reliable weekly view of commercial position across the portfolio.
Meanwhile, the cost definition disputes — previously a recurring source of friction between commercial managers — disappeared as a direct consequence of the standardisation work. That had not been the brief. Instead, it emerged as a by-product of fixing the data properly rather than working around it.
Finally, the Commercial Director has his Thursday afternoons back.
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