What we do, in detail.
Four practices. Each one says what it covers, what it produces, and — at the end — one thing it does not do. If a claim here would be awkward to be asked about, it is not on this page.
Project management
An award arrives as one number and one promise. Our job is to turn it into pieces small enough to place, measure and pay for — and then to keep four different truths about it straight at the same time.
The award, its packages, its deliverables and milestones Dates and budget on each
From one award to pieces you can actually manage
We break the award into work packages and place each one with a company. Every package carries its own scope, value, dates and — this is the part people skip — the method by which its progress will be measured, agreed before anybody starts.
Under each package sit the deliverables and the milestones: what has to be handed over, by when, for how much, and what counts as proof that it was. A milestone with no date and no budget is not a milestone, so we do not record one.
Budgeted, delivered, invoiced, claimed The gap each period has to explain
Four measures that are never allowed to collapse into one
A project can be eighty per cent built, ninety-five per cent invoiced, forty per cent certified and twelve days late, all at the same time. Every one of those is true, and a single "percent complete" hides three of them.
So progress is measured by the method the package declared — units completed, milestones reached, a rule of credit — and never by how confident the last report sounded. Earned value comes from physical progress. An invoice is a claim about money, not evidence that work happened.
Every period we reconcile: what was budgeted, what was delivered, what was invoiced, and what has been claimed from the funder. The gaps are the point. A gap that nobody can explain is the earliest warning a project gives you.
A schedule that knows which days are working days
Dependencies, float and a critical path, built on the same work packages rather than in a separate file that drifts out of date by week three.
It counts the working week and the public holidays of the country the work is in. A schedule that assumes Saturday and Sunday are the weekend will be wrong every week in Kabul, and wrong in a way that compounds. Where the calendar differs, the calendar is configuration — not something buried in the software.
Lateness is reported against time, not against money spent. A project that has spent its budget on schedule can still be two months late, and the figure that hides this is the one most reports lead with.
- What project management does not do: we do not supervise your staff or direct the work on the ground day to day. The company placed with the work manages its own crew; we manage the agreement, the measurement and the record.
Procurement
We are paid out of the work, whoever wins it. That makes every choice we make about who wins something we have to be able to defend — so we write down how the choice was made, before we make it.
How a company is chosen, and how it is written down
Quotes are collected and compared side by side — the amount, the currency, the date each arrived. One is chosen, and the decision carries a written justification saying why that one. The comparison is frozen at the moment of the decision, because a comparison you can edit afterwards is not evidence of anything.
Where a shortlist is drawn, the rule used to draw it is recorded and visible. We profit from whoever wins, so "we picked the best three" is not an answer anybody should accept from us — including you.
A placement made in an emergency without a full exercise is allowed, and it is recorded as exactly that, wherever that placement appears. The system will not let it look like a competition that happened.
Screening at the start, and again on a schedule
Every company is screened against the sanctions and debarment lists its market requires — when it joins, and again on the cadence that market sets. A screening done once in 2024 is not a screening; it is a memory.
Qualifications carry expiry dates, and an expired qualification closes a gate rather than raising a note somebody may or may not read. A licence that lapsed last month stops a payment this month. That is inconvenient exactly when it should be.
Which lists apply, and how often they must be re-run, is the market's own configuration — not a list we shipped and not a judgement we make on a funder's behalf.
- What procurement does not do: we do not run your tender under your own procurement regulations and we do not certify compliance with them. We run a defensible exercise, record it in full, and hand you the record to put in front of your auditor.
Construction and civil works
Building work fails in specific ways — a variation nobody wrote down, a certificate signed for work nobody saw, retention that quietly never comes back. These are the ones we handle.
Lots, certificates, retention and variations
Scope is split into lots that can be placed, measured and certified separately, so one slow lot does not hold the whole build. Each milestone has a certificate behind it naming what was inspected and by whom.
Retention is tracked as money that is owed, not money that is gone. It has a release condition and a date, and both are visible to the company that is waiting for it.
A variation is a recorded change request, not an argument. Somebody proposes it, somebody decides it, and the decision carries a date and a reason. Six months later the question "who agreed to this and when" has an answer, which is the whole reason the record exists.
Where a site cannot be visited safely, somebody independent goes
Site evidence carries the time it was captured. A photograph taken at handover and a photograph taken three weeks earlier are different facts, and the record keeps them different.
Where a funder, a Prime or both cannot reach a site, an independent monitor is placed on named projects and reports what it found. The finding is recorded as the monitor's own — not merged into the contractor's report, and not edited by anyone with an interest in what it says.
- What construction does not do: we are not the engineer of record and we do not sign off structural or safety design. We do not hold any professional certification we have not named, and we do not test materials. Where a qualified engineer must certify something, a qualified engineer certifies it and we record who, when and against what.
Administration and compliance
This is the part nobody wants and the part everything else depends on. It is also the part we can take off a contractor's desk entirely.
Entries, in the order they happened A correction points back at what it corrects Editing an entry: not possible
An audit trail where nothing is edited after the fact
Records are added, never overwritten. A correction is a new entry that names what it corrects and why, and the original stays exactly where it was. When an auditor asks what a figure was in March, there is one answer and it does not depend on anybody's memory.
A submitted claim period is frozen. Corrections to it land in the next period as adjustments, which is how accounting has always worked and how almost no software behaves.
Claims, invoices, withholding and closeout
Claims are assembled with their backing attached — the deliverable, the proof, the invoice, the certificate. The funder receives one document with everything behind it, in that funder's format and that funder's language.
Tax withholding is computed by the rules of the market the work is in, at the rates that market sets, and those rates are configuration rather than something written into the software. When a rate changes, the change is a record with a date, and figures already certified do not silently move.
Documents are retained for the period the award requires. At closeout, what has to be handed over is handed over as a set, not reassembled from four inboxes.
And when a company would rather send us the receipts than file any of this themselves, our staff does it — per relationship, by their choice.
- What administration does not do: we are not your accountants, your auditors or your tax advisers. We do not file your tax returns and we do not give legal advice. We compute what the market's rules say and we produce the record — your accountant and your auditor are the people who sign for it.
Tell us which of these you need
Most people need two of the four. Tell us the work, where it is, and which part is causing you trouble — we will tell you plainly whether we are the right people for it.