Construction payment assurance pilot: design a fixed-fee diagnostic

Identify the owner who can buy and validate the work

The strongest starting buyer has repeat capital projects, authority to share the relevant records and a recurring review problem. Identify the sponsor, data owner, commercial decision maker and independent reviewer. A person who feels the paperwork burden may be unable to authorize either access or spending.

Ask which decision the diagnostic should improve: markup treatment, duplicate settlement, approved-versus-billed mapping or another specific control. Limit the first scope to the question that has reliable ground truth. Do not sell a complete capital-program finance replacement before proving one review queue.

Write the engagement boundary before receiving the data

State the contracts, period, population, source systems, tests and exclusions. Specify the expected documents and reconciliation of delivered records. Agree access, handling, retention and the destination for findings. Use authorized redacted records for an initial demonstration and approved access for the actual engagement.

Define the fixed fee, expected buyer effort and change-control process for missing data or additional contracts. Agree the price against the actual evidence request and review deliverable. A pilot fee and a later annual engagement are separate purchases, and neither should be presented as established market pricing without real buyer evidence.

Choose records that can disprove the product claim

Include ordinary correct payments, known resolved issues, unresolved exceptions and imperfect source documents. Give the reviewer the expected treatment for known cases without treating those cases as independent evidence of prevalence. Preserve the raw population and sampling rationale.

A good test challenges both sensitivity and restraint. Can the workflow identify a repeated charge, clear a legitimate partial payment and admit that a disputed entitlement needs a human decision? Record collection time, reviewer time and false positives. A system that always raises an exception has not established useful assurance.

Worked example: reject a flag-heavy result

In a fictional diagnostic of 40 selected items, the system raises 15 candidates. Independent review confirms three issues, clears nine and leaves three unresolved. The owner validates $8,000 of distinct adjustments and six hours of reduced review work after accounting for checking time.

That result is more useful than a headline based on the original 15 flags, but it does not automatically justify an annual contract. Ask whether the same queue recurs, whether the adjustments were recoverable or prevented, and whether the next deployment needs less bespoke work. The figures are invented and do not describe a Buildalytic customer.

Pre-agree expand, revise and stop conditions

Expand when the buyer validates a meaningful monetary or operational result and the same control can repeat across further projects. Revise when a useful issue exists but data collection or false positives consume the benefit. Stop when lawful access, independent validation or repeatable economics cannot be established.

Buildalytic's current public offering includes construction workflows for collecting records, follow-up and approvals. Ask the team to identify which pilot steps are supported now and which require separately scoped assurance logic or connectors. Keep the buyer's systems of record and approval rights intact. The next purchase should follow demonstrated recurring value and an explicit annual scope, not the assumption that a historical diagnostic is already ARR.

Sources: Buildalytic: current custom-workflow scope