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A CRM Built for General Contractors — Because Salesforce Doesn't Know What a Change Order Is

Key Outcome
$1.4M
in unbilled change orders captured in Q1
Team
12 engineers
Timeline
14 weeks
Industry
Construction
01The Situation

A commercial general contractor — $120M annual revenue, operating across three states. Managing 40+ active projects simultaneously. They had invested in Salesforce with a construction 'overlay' from a consulting partner. The overlay added some construction terminology but fundamentally it was still a B2B sales CRM trying to pretend it understood construction project management.

02What Changed

A $8M school construction project had three active change orders not properly tracked in the CRM. Billing on two of them was 60 days overdue. The project manager was managing change orders in a spreadsheet — which defeated the purpose of the CRM. The operations VP estimated the company was leaking $1-2M annually in unbilled or under-billed change orders across all projects.

03Why The Algorithm

They needed a CRM built from the ground up around construction workflows — not a horizontal CRM with a construction skin.

04What We Built

Vertical CRM for commercial general contracting. Data model built around the actual entities: projects, phases, trades, subcontractors, change orders, RFIs, submittals, pay applications, retainage. Project pipeline organized by lifecycle stage — pursuit, preconstruction, active construction, closeout, warranty. Change order management with full approval workflow, cost impact analysis, and automatic billing queue integration. Subcontractor management — qualification tracking, insurance certificate monitoring, pay application processing. AIA G702/G703 formatted pay applications generated automatically from project cost data. Document management integrated into every workflow.

05 — The Result

$1.4M in previously unbilled changes captured in the first quarter. Subcontractor insurance compliance went from 'checked when we remember' to automated. Estimating-to-project handoff that used to take 2 weeks happened in one click. The operations VP: 'This is the first system that works the way we actually work.'

Facing a Similar Situation?

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