Most searches for custom software for construction companies in Australia land on product comparison sites, because the industry is not short of products. Builders and contractors already run Procore, SimPRO, Aroflo, Buildxact, Xero or MYOB, and usually two or three of them at once. Almost nobody needs another platform. What they need is the missing piece between the ones they have, and the site-end tool that fills those systems with real data on the day the work happens rather than at month end.
Be clear about where we come from. Drawn AI was started in 2024 by Liam and Jacob, out of retail operations management and mining operations. We have not come up through construction. What mining operations does share with a site is the shape of the problem: prestarts, permits, contractor inductions, plant on hire, and paperwork produced by people wearing gloves in bad light with no coverage. Everything on this page is what can be built for a construction business, not a list of jobs we have delivered for one.
The recurring problem in this industry is not that nobody records anything. It is that everything is recorded twice — once on site in a diary, a docket book or a photo roll, and again in the office days later by someone typing it into the job management system. Between those two events, the information that would have changed a decision is unavailable. The variation is signed off verbally and argued about at final claim. The subbie who let their public liability lapse worked for a fortnight before anyone noticed. The job that ran over on labour is discovered at practical completion, which is roughly two months after the point at which it could have been pulled back.
Capabilities
What we build
Job costing that updates while the job is running
Labour, materials, plant, purchase orders and committed cost tied to a cost code and posted against the estimate as the job runs — not reconciled after the supplier invoices arrive. What matters is committed cost, because a purchase order raised today is money spent today even though it will not appear in Xero for six weeks. Forecast final cost and cost to complete are then something a project manager can look at on a Wednesday, not a number produced for the WIP report.
Variations, and being able to prove they were approved
A variation raised from site with photos and a description, priced, sent, and either approved or not — with a timestamp, a name and the version of the scope it was raised against. Provisional sums, day works and latent conditions handled the same way. The value shows up at final claim, when the question is whether the client's site foreman actually said yes in March, and there is a record instead of two recollections.
Subcontractor onboarding and insurance currency
Prequalification, licences, white cards, high risk work tickets, workers compensation, public liability and professional indemnity, all with expiry dates that are checked by the system rather than by someone remembering. A subcontractor whose certificate of currency has lapsed should be flagged before they are engaged for the next package, not found during an audit. This is the same risk and compliance system work applied to a subcontractor register.
SWMS, prestarts and permits captured in the field
SWMS acknowledged by the people actually on the tools that morning, prestart and plant checks recorded against a specific asset, toolbox talks with attendance, and permits for hot works or confined space raised and closed out on the phone. A defect raised at 6am becomes a maintenance job that morning instead of a line in a book in a ute. Built as field and mobile apps that write to the device first, because half the sites in this country lose signal somewhere between the gate and the basement.
Site diaries, photos and plant on hire
Who was on site, what trades, what was done, what was standing around waiting and why — weather, access, an RFI still unanswered. Photos attached to the job, the lot and the day, geotagged and time-stamped, compressed on the device because a crew shooting a hundred photos a day on mobile data adds up. Plant tracked by where it is, whose hire it is on, when it was last serviced and when it should have been off-hired, since wet hire running two weeks past the need for it is one of the quietest costs on a job.
Progress claims, retentions and the money still owed
Claim schedules built from what has actually been completed rather than from last month's claim plus a guess, with the payment schedule response and its dates recorded against the security of payment timeframes that apply in your state. Retentions tracked per job and per subcontractor, with release at practical completion and at the end of the defects liability period flagged before it ages out. Retention money nobody chased is the most commonly forgotten asset on a builder's balance sheet.
Signs this is worth looking at
Dockets, diaries and timesheets reach the office days after the work, and a proportion of them never arrive at all.
Job costs are accurate at the end of a job and approximate during it, so overruns are confirmed rather than caught.
Someone rekeys site paperwork into Procore, SimPRO or Aroflo, which is slow and is where most of the errors come from.
Whether a variation was approved comes down to an email thread, a text message and two people's memory.
Subcontractor insurances are tracked in a spreadsheet, and the reminder is a person, not a system.
An app was rolled out to site once and quietly abandoned, because it needed coverage the sites do not have.
Nobody can answer "what happened on that job on the 14th" without ringing whoever was there.
Retention on a job finished eighteen months ago has not been claimed and nobody is sure of the release date.
How It Works
How we approach it
1
Discover
A paid discovery session with the people at both ends — the project manager or contract administrator who needs the numbers, and a site supervisor who will have to use whatever we build. Site staff decide whether a tool gets used or worked around, so their view carries more weight than head office's.
2
Map
We map the paperwork as it actually exists: every field on the prestart, every column on the docket, the real approval path for a variation, and which of those fields has ever been used for anything. Most site forms lose a third of their fields at this step and lose nothing else. Where the underlying problem is the process rather than the software, business process analysis is the honest starting point.
3
Design
Designed for one thumb, direct sunlight, gloves and a cracked screen. Large targets, short forms, sensible defaults, and as few free-text boxes as we can get away with. If a screen needs more than about fifteen minutes of explanation, the design is wrong and we change it before it is built.
4
Build and integrate
We build it and connect it to what you already run — job costing and accounting in Xero or MYOB, job management in SimPRO, Aroflo or Buildxact, project records in Procore. The rekeying step disappears through workflow automation, and paperwork that has to stay on paper — supplier invoices, subcontractor certificates of currency, delivery dockets — can be read automatically with document AI rather than typed.
5
Optimise
Roll it out on one job and one crew first, alongside the existing paperwork, then stop the paper. Under the subscription we keep refining it as the captured data shows where people are struggling: the screen everyone abandons, the field everyone leaves blank.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
No. Those systems are usually doing their job, and replacing them is expensive and disruptive for little gain. We build what sits between them, or the site-end capture they are weak at, and write the results back through their APIs. If the honest answer is that better configuration of what you already own would fix it, we will tell you that instead.
Subscription pricing rather than a fixed project fee — monthly billing, a three-month minimum term, 30 days' notice to cancel. What moves the figure is the number of distinct site forms and workflows, how many office systems it writes into, and whether you need iOS, Android or both. You get the monthly number after discovery, before any build begins.
Yes, and that is the starting assumption rather than an extra. The app writes to the device first and treats the network as occasional, so a full day can be completed in a basement, a lift shaft or out past the last tower. When coverage returns it uploads in the background and shows clearly what has synced and what is still queued.
Nothing, unless the tool is faster than the docket book. That is the only test that matters, and it is a design problem rather than a training problem. We design with a supervisor in the room, test on the oldest phone in your fleet, and replace one form at a time rather than all of them at once, so a rejection costs a fortnight instead of a rollout.
The demand on your team is heaviest at the start — a few hours of interviews and access to your systems. After that most of the work happens away from you. Rollout runs on one job first, in parallel with existing paperwork, so nothing is switched off while it is unproven. Training a crew is usually about fifteen minutes.
It can track them. Claim dates, payment schedule responses and the statutory windows that apply in your state can be recorded and flagged before they lapse, with the supporting evidence attached to the claim. We build the system that keeps the dates and the paperwork in front of you — it is not legal advice, and your contract administrator or lawyer still owns the position.
Want to talk it through before committing to anything?
A first conversation costs nothing and usually ends with a clearer idea of what is worth building — sometimes that answer is “not yet”, and we will say so.