Key Results
- Month-end finance reconciliation from 3 days to under 4 hours
- Site reporting standardised across all live projects for the first time
- No additional headcount required to absorb a 40% increase in project volume
The Challenge: A Decade of Decisions Without Construction Systems Integration
A fit-out specialist working across three offices and running twenty-plus live projects at any given time had assembled its technology stack over a decade of individual decisions, with no construction systems integration holding the pieces together. COINS handled finance and commercial management. Meanwhile, Procore handled project delivery and site operations. Nobody had ever connected the two properly.
The consequences accumulated gradually. Site managers reported progress and costs into Procore. Finance then reconciled against COINS. Between the two, a commercial manager spent the first three days of every month pulling figures out of both systems by hand, resolving the discrepancies, and producing a consolidated view that the finance director could take into month-end close.
Those discrepancies were almost always explainable. However, they were never small — and never the same discrepancies twice, which meant the reconciliation demanded active judgement rather than a simple check.
Beyond month-end, the disconnection created a persistent visibility problem. Senior management could see reliable commercial data or reliable delivery data, but never both in the same place at the same time. As a result, the firm allocated resources on partial information, and the cost of that stayed invisible — buried in margins that consistently came in below what the estimating team expected.
The Approach: Standardise the Data, Then Connect the Systems
The engagement opened with an operations audit — two weeks of structured interviews and process mapping across the commercial, delivery, finance, and site functions. That audit opens every business automation consulting engagement we run.
Step 1: Audit what was actually broken.
The COINS-Procore gap was the most visible problem, but not the only one. First, site managers across the three offices logged the same information in different formats. In addition, the delivery team shared no agreed definition of project stage completion. Worse still, commercial managers ran three separate cost-to-complete methodologies between them — all technically correct, none of them consistent.
Step 2: Make the sequencing decision.
Therefore, we recommended fixing the process and data standardisation issues before touching the integration itself. The client did not expect this; they had engaged us expecting a technical project. So we explained the reasoning plainly: connect inconsistent data and you simply buy a faster, more expensive version of the same problem.
Step 3: Standardise data and process (Phase 1).
We agreed a single site reporting format and rolled it out across all three offices. Then we standardised the project stage definitions across the delivery team. Finally, we adopted one cost-to-complete methodology as the firm’s standard, with a documented rationale covering when exceptions applied.
Step 4: Build the construction systems integration (Phase 2).
With consistent data flowing into both platforms, the COINS-Procore link sat on a clean foundation. Defined data points now move automatically between the two systems every day. Consequently, month-end reconciliation means checking the automated output for exceptions instead of rebuilding the whole picture from scratch.
Step 5: Add the management reporting layer (Phase 3).
A consolidated project dashboard draws from both systems and gives senior management a real-time view of commercial position and delivery status across the portfolio. Moreover, that view had never existed before without a three-day manual exercise behind it.
The Results of Construction Systems Integration
Month-end finance reconciliation dropped from three days to under four hours. Instead of historical reconciliation, the commercial manager who used to own that process now spends the recovered days on forward-looking commercial analysis.
Site reporting runs consistently across all offices and all project managers — for the first time in the firm’s history. As a result, the management team can compare project performance meaningfully, because the underlying data now follows the same rules everywhere.
In the twelve months after implementation, project volume grew by 40 percent. Nevertheless, the finance and commercial team absorbed it without adding a single head, because the systems finally did the work that people had previously done by hand.
Severus anonymised this case study and changed client details to protect confidentiality.
Related: Business Automation Consulting · All Severus case studies · Construction reporting automation
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