The problem we kept hitting
Running a small residential build sounds simple. It is not. There are 18 trades, 200 line items in a cost centre, three suppliers giving you the wrong PO number, a client texting variations on a Friday afternoon, and a Xero account waiting on invoices that were never raised. Every spreadsheet patches one corner of this. None of them hold the whole shape of a build.
The off-the-shelf "construction management" platforms had the opposite problem — built for tier-one head contractors, priced for them, and weighted with features no working builder ever uses. Trying to wedge a four-house-a-year company into that software felt like wearing a suit two sizes too big.
What we set out to build
One system, not five apps. Plan take-offs on your PDFs, quotes built from assemblies, cost centres your way, a site board for every trade, daily site diary, variations, stage payments and Xero — all wired together so a change in one place flows through everywhere it should. No dual entry. No "did you update the spreadsheet too?".
The flow of a real build, modelled. Take off the plan. Build the quote. Win the job. Budget locks. Run the site. Track spend. Bill in stages. Push to Xero. When something changes, it goes through Variations — signed, costed, tracked. The structure stops you accidentally torching your margin.
Australian by default. Stage payments matching residential progress claims. Xero as the accounting backbone. Prebuilt cost centre structure that matches how Australian residential builds are actually costed — or plug in your own. Gold Coast-built and tested on real jobs before anyone else sees it.
Every feature has to earn its keep on a real job. If it isn't being used on a site this week, it isn't going in the product.
Who BuildManager is for
Small-to-mid Australian residential builders. One to ten concurrent jobs. New homes, renovations, knock-down-rebuilds. The kind of builder who is on site in the morning and doing paperwork at the kitchen bench at 9pm — and would rather not be.
If you're a tier-one head contractor on commercial builds with 200 staff, BuildManager isn't for you yet. If you're a sparkie running your own jobs, the workflow probably overshoots what you need. If you're a residential builder running real projects with real subbies, it's built for you.
Where we are now
BuildManager is live and being used to manage real builds on the Gold Coast — from plan take-off through to final Xero invoice. The free trial is open to new builders: 3 jobs, 3 users, 3 months, no credit card. We use the feedback from our builders to continue to advance and streamline the BuildManager system. Every signed-up builder gets a real human on the other end of an email when something needs sorting.
Want to talk? Email hello@buildmanager.cloud — it lands on a real person, not a ticketing system.