GMP cost tracking software for owners
The contractor's contingency runs out in month 13. The building is 41 percent built.
Nobody told the owner, because the only ledger on the contract belongs to the contractor. Costwitness keeps the owner's own.
You signed a price cap. Underneath it sit two funds for the unexpected.
A guaranteed maximum price is a ceiling, not a bill. The ceiling and the schedule of values under it come from the GMP Amendment, Exhibit A to AIA A133 on a construction manager at risk job, or from the agreement itself under A102. Below the ceiling sits the contractor's contingency, carried inside the GMP to absorb what the contractor did not foresee. Beside it sits your own contingency, held outside the GMP for what you will ask for later. The two funds have different purposes, and different owners.
Every time something happens on site, someone decides which of the two funds pays. A duct that does not fit. A drawing that omitted a damper count. Rock under a pile cap. Each one is charged to one fund or the other, and the decision moves real money from one side of the contract to the other.
The party making that decision, in practice, is the contractor. The contingency log, the change order list and the pay application are all written by the contractor's project team, in the contractor's system, on the contractor's schedule.
You find out in a monthly summary, written by the same party that spends the money. There is no second set of figures to check it against. So you take the contractor's word for it, because there is nothing else to take.
Where the GMP sits today, from the product dashboard. Fictional project. The contractor's contingency is a line inside the cap. Yours is held outside it.
Four things that go wrong quietly.
None of these shows up as a line in the pay application. Each one is a decision made without you, or a date that passed without anyone counting.
A contingency that empties before anyone notices.
The contractor's fund is reported as a percentage drawn. Sixty six percent sounds survivable. Empty in two months, with thirteen months of work left, does not. Once it is gone, events it would have absorbed arrive as owner change orders, and nobody announces the moment it happened. What happens after that.
A change billed as your scope when it was a design gap.
The cause written on a change order decides who pays. Owner scope is your money and adds to the GMP. A design gap is the contractor's fund under the contract. The same duct conflict can carry either label, and the label is assigned by the party that benefits from one of them.
A savings pool smaller than it should be.
Buyout below the GMP line builds a pool that the contract splits between you and the contractor. An overrun on one package reduces it, an allowance overrun reduces it, and an unclassified change parked as a design gap reduces it again. You see the pool at closeout, if then. Who owns the savings.
A notice deadline missed.
Most contracts give the owner a fixed number of days to respond to a claim or a change notice. The days are counted by nobody. A missed deadline weakens your position on that item, which is a money event, and it is recorded nowhere. The clock nobody is watching.
Your own ledger, written from your own documents.
The software applies rules and raises flags. It does not decide causes. People decide causes, and the ledger records who decided, when, and what it cost. You stop taking the contractor's word for it.
Two funds kept apart.
Contractor contingency and owner contingency are recorded on separate ledgers and charted against percent complete. The chart at the top of this page is that chart. A draw without a supporting document is flagged. The month the contractor's fund runs dry is stated as a month, not a percentage.
A cause on every change.
Owner scope, design gap, unforeseen condition, coordination, or unclassified. The cause decides which fund pays. Every change to a cause is written to an audit trail with a name and a timestamp. Items unclassified for more than thirty days are flagged until someone decides.
A savings pool you can check.
Each package carries its GMP line value next to its awarded value. The pool is the running difference, less booked overruns, split on the terms read from your contract at setup. A sensitivity table shows what the pool becomes if the open items land as owner scope, or as design gaps.
Deadlines counted in days.
Each change order carries its notice date, the contractual notice deadline, and the days remaining. A missed deadline is recorded as missed, with the item and the value it affects, so it is a known fact and not a surprise at closeout.
The change order register, as it renders in the product. Fictional project. A cause on every item, the age in days, and who pays once the cause is set. See all nine modules.
The monthly report is generated, not assembled.
Today the owner's monthly position is built by hand. Someone opens the contractor's pay application, the contingency log and the change order list, copies the figures into a spreadsheet, reconciles the three against each other, and writes a narrative for the board or the lender. Next month it is done again from scratch, and last month's version is a file somewhere.
With a ledger of your own, the report is produced on the first of the month from what was already entered during the month. Twelve pages in a fixed order: cover, position summary, drawdown against progress, the change register with its cause split, open and unclassified items, buyout and the savings pool, allowance reconciliation, anticipated final cost, cash flow, shared savings, flags raised and closed, and what to decide before the next one.
What stops being manual: retyping figures from three sources, reconciling them against each other, comparing this month to last, and drawing the charts. What stays yours: the decisions. The report shows the facts in the same order every month, so the board reads the movement and not the formatting.
In the sample project on this page, five unclassified change orders carry $508,000. A year of the software costs $23,400.
Page 8 of the monthly owner report, as generated: anticipated final cost as a waterfall from the GMP. Fictional project. Inline SVG, so it prints the way it displays.
It manages the inside of the GMP contract. Nothing else.
The distinction is the product. The development budget, the accounting system and the contractor's project management platform each have their own tool. This one has a narrower job and does not reach outside it.
It does not post to a general ledger and does not replace one. It records what the contract says and what the draws show.
No money moves through it. Pay applications are read, not paid.
The contractor keeps its platform. The owner keeps a second ledger, written from the owner's documents.
Land, soft costs and financing live elsewhere. This covers the GMP line and what moves inside it.
A spreadsheet, the contractor's report, or Procore. What each one cannot do.
All three are reasonable tools. None of them is a second ledger. That is the gap this product fills, and nothing else.
The spreadsheet.
Free, flexible, and yours. Also retyped from three sources every month, reconciled by hand, and edited in place, so last month's figure is whatever the formula says today. There is no audit trail on a changed cell, and the whole thing leaves when its author does. The ledger keeps versions, stores monthly snapshots, and records who changed what.
The contractor's report.
Accurate on its own terms, and written by the party being paid. It shows the contingency as one number, the changes without a cause history, and the buyout when the contractor chooses to show it. Reading it is necessary. Checking it against your own record is the part that is missing, because there is no second record to check it against.
Procore.
The contractor's platform, and good at running the job. The owner reads what the contractor shares, in the contractor's structure, for as long as the contractor keeps the project open. It is the first ledger. It cannot also be the second one, and it does not carry the one field the owner needs most: who decided the cause, and when.
If a spreadsheet run by a person you trust is working for you, keep it. This exists for the owner who wants the record to outlive the spreadsheet and the summary to stop being the only source. Read how I work.
One cost consultant, twenty years of doing this by hand.
I spent those years on the commercial side of construction contracts: reviewing pay applications, certifying payment, pricing change orders, closing out contracts, and the monthly argument about what a contractor’s application really supports. Contract forms differ from job to job. The arithmetic, and the argument, do not. Costwitness is the system I wanted on every one of those jobs and never had.
Every rule has a scar behind it.
The baseline is frozen because I have watched a schedule of values change quietly between months. The two contingency funds are never added together because I have seen what happens when they are.
The notice clock is the one I needed.
A good claim lost on a date is the most expensive kind of loss there is, and it is always avoidable. So a deadline in this product sends an email before it passes, not a red mark afterwards.
I am not engaged as your adviser.
I do not advise on your contract and I hold no professional credentials in the United States. I am not a replacement for the cost consultant, owner’s representative or counsel you already use. I build the record. The judgment stays with you.
Your documents never leave.
Nothing you upload is ever sent to an external AI service for reading, scoring or summarizing. That is written into the terms of service rather than stated on a page, and it is why the checks in this product are arithmetic against your own record rather than a machine’s opinion of it.
Owners who sign the GMP and do not run the job.
Also used by school districts, universities and public agencies, where the same ledger answers to a board, a bond program or a records request.
Put your own numbers in. Read what they imply.
Every calculator shows its result on the page. The email is asked for only if you want the same result sent to you. Under twelve inputs each, and each one has a permalink you can send to a colleague.
A score out of 100 with a band, built from six weighted sub scores. The weakest line is named first, in plain words, because that single sentence is what gets remembered in the room.
Output: a score, a band, the weakest sub score A date, not a percentage Contingency RunwaySeven inputs. The month the contractor fund runs out at the current burn rate, and how many months of construction follow it.
Output: an exhaustion month and a burn ratio The library Shared Savings and four moreShared savings split, change order exposure by cause, escalation by region, schedule float, and a confidence band on every allowance.
Output: a figure on the page, and the same result by email if you askPer active project. Never per seat.
An owner has one project and fifteen people who need to read it. Charging per seat works against that, so every project carries unlimited users. Start with a free 14-day trial on your own project, no card. The ninety day pilot at $6,500 is there if you would rather we did the setup, credited against your first six months, applied on your invoices. The full pricing page.
- Every module
- Unlimited users
- Monthly owner report
- Everything in Project
- Lender and investor guest access
- Classification questions answered within 48 hours, working days
- Everything in Program
- Portfolio view across projects
- A named contact, answering within 48 hours on working days
Prices in US dollars. The subscription runs while the project is active and ends at closeout. The pilot covers the setup: we build and freeze the baseline from your documents and configure the contract terms with you. That is implementation of a system, not a professional opinion on your contract.
Send us one pay application. We will check it.
One G703 with the names redacted. Six checks against the schedule of values it came from, and a written answer in two working days. No charge, and no follow up unless you ask for one.