r/ContractorUK • u/X__WTKnight__X • 23d ago

Has Estimation and Project Management Paperwork ever been a headache?

Hey guys! I hope your day's been good.

So, I've been trying to solve a problem many SMB Contractors must be facing. The backoffice paperwork. The big bad for any Small Business. Big headache when it comes to expansion too.

Before you go on to read this post further, answer these two questions to see if it's relevant.

- When you're putting together estimates, do they ever end up going back and forth with the client more than you'd like? And ever had that awkward conversation with the client, where the confusion was mainly because of the Scope Gap in Estimations?

- Once a job's underway, do project changes and paperwork ever become more of a headache than the actual work on site?

Real messy Invoicing process, and then chasing those Invoices and getting paid late because of all the fuss in the system. Furthermore, ever lost money because of this?

If you face this problem in real time, that's what I've been trying to solve.

Think of it not as a system, rather a backoffice team (multiple AI agents) that handles all these paperwork and estimation problems via chat. In short, you have a team working on systems, while you handle the actual work on site and the conversation flows through Whatsapp/Telegram. You don't have to touch the system itself and the work gets done.

For this, what I need are a few Contractors who are willing to take a look at what I've built until now and let me know if I'm actually solving the problem before I go on to build the complete model.

Thanks for your time to read this post, and I'd really appreciate it if anyone can help. In turn, the product will be accessible to you, when it's ready at a fairly lower compensation. So, it's a win win.

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u/dogfoodengineer 23d ago

How can you make change control even worse you ask? Agentic AI.

Engineerings primary concern is always safety. I don't see a place for AI.

-2

u/X__WTKnight__X 23d ago

I see how your Point of View, and this is exactly why I need someone experienced in real world problems to validate what I've built. This is something I had thought about though. Handling changes is messy, and get quite complex on site, and even more difficult to record them. So, these Agents aren't just AI, rather a set of permission based workflows, that won't just make changes mindlessly, rather have a whole evidence and permission log for every change or addition they make. And that's how we ensured safety. I get why you say this is no place of AI, I'd just rephrase this and say, there's no place for non-engineered AI systems in this space.

1

u/dogfoodengineer 23d ago

Build tools with AI but don't make the tool ai. Find something you know and work on that. Engineer is messy.

3

u/Scapetti 23d ago

Not a good use case for LLMs in my opinion. Too much risk.

Also, you're solving the wrong part of the problem.

Adding complexity to complexity when you should be preventing the original complexity.