How a $400M Australian construction firm replaced fragile Excel-based forecasting with a platform that actually runs — and what it took to get there.
The problem
The client — a multi-division building services contractor — was running project revenue forecasting across five business units in Excel, on SharePoint. The team knew the process. The data was there. The logic was sound.
The problem wasn’t the maths. It was the infrastructure underneath it.
- Links broke. The consolidated dashboard pulled from five separate spreadsheets. When a link dropped, the numbers were wrong and someone had to manually hunt the issue.
- No single source of truth. Division sheets and the tender platform held overlapping data. Prospective jobs lived in multiple places with no guaranteed sync.
- Accrued expenses sat on top as another manual layer. Over-billed and under-billed smoothing fed the accounts. If the upstream was wrong, the downstream was wrong.
- No forward view. There was no easy way to use tender win rates and time-phased project profiles to see dips, concentrations or cash-flow gaps three to six months out.
Finance was spending days a month chasing references. Leadership couldn’t trust the consolidated number without a manual sense-check. The forecast was right when it was right, and nobody could tell you when that was.
The forecasting logic wasn’t the issue. The tooling was.
What we built
A web platform that replaced the spreadsheet workflow with a single database. Division managers still enter their own data — the difference is it lands in one place, not five.
- Project register. Every active and prospective job across all divisions in one list. Status, value, margin, billing schedule, pipeline confidence — one record per project.
- Revenue forecasting. Monthly projections per project in the format the team already used. Automatic roll-up by division, status and period. No linked spreadsheets.
- Accrued expense engine. Over-billed and under-billed calculations driven by forecast data and expected margins. Finance reviews and approves rather than calculates.
- Time-phased profiles. A $100M project delivered over twelve months looks very different to one delivered in two. The platform makes that visible.
- Predictive pipeline. Tender win rates applied to prospective jobs. Dips and concentrations surface before they hit cash.
- Role-based access. Division managers see their own data and aggregates. Leadership and finance see everything. Configurable per user.
What changed
Three things, in order of how the client described them:
- The numbers are trusted. Leadership briefs the board from the platform directly, not from a manually reconciled deck.
- The finance team got days back. The manual reconciliation and link-chasing is gone. That capacity moved to higher-value work.
- Decisions changed. The predictive pipeline and time-phased view started informing tender prioritisation and cash decisions, which were previously made on gut and the most recent spreadsheet refresh.
How we did it
A few decisions mattered more than the rest:
- We didn’t replace the tender platform. We integrated with it. Replacing tools your team already trusts is the fastest way to lose adoption.
- We migrated the existing data. Day one in the new platform looked like day 365 in the old one — nothing was lost, nothing had to be rebuilt by hand.
- We worked in short phases. Discovery, core build, advanced features, UAT, go-live. Each phase ended with something the team could see and react to.
- We left it running. The platform doesn’t need us to operate. Support is available, but the client owns the system and its data.
The win wasn’t a dashboard. It was that finance stopped firefighting and started forecasting.
If this sounds familiar
Most operating businesses have a version of this problem hiding in plain sight. Critical numbers running through a brittle stack of spreadsheets, owned by one person, trusted on faith. Until they’re not.
Replacing that infrastructure isn’t a transformation project. It’s a six-to-twelve week build with a clear scope and a measurable outcome.
Got a spreadsheet that’s secretly running your business?
That’s the kind of problem we ship for. Get in touch.