Built for the
engine room.
You process the volume. Subs, claims, variations, retentions. All day.
Twenty sub claims a week. Three variation chains a day. The retention register lives in Excel. The head contract lives in Dropbox. Half your week is moving data between systems instead of certifying claims.
Deep Space was built by construction experts who've sat in your chair, and it puts every subcontract, every claim, every VO, and every retention release on one register with the audit trail attached.
What your day actually looks like
QS is a particularly common title in NZ. In Australia the equivalent work often sits with a Senior CA. Either way, the role is the same: own the commercial mechanics, make every calculation defensible, keep the audit trail.
You sit between the PM (who owns delivery) and Finance (who owns the ledger). In larger mid-tier builders you specialise by project. In smaller builders you cover three or four jobs at once. Either way, the audit trail starts and ends on your desk.
"We have people dragging PDFs off emails and trying to match purchase orders manually. It's a full-time job. There has to be a better way."
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What you're dealing with
Mid-tier commercial builders have never had a CA platform. Too senior for the basic tools, too transactional for the enterprise dashboards. You sit in the gap, moving paper between systems.
The sub claims 80 percent complete. The PM says 65. The site diary says nothing. You're certifying on a phone call with the foreman, hoping the variance you recorded is the one that holds up at final account.
A client instruction lands Tuesday. It's a sub variation Thursday. By Friday you're searching three inboxes to remember the exact wording, the date, and whether anyone confirmed the price.
PC was last month. The release should have triggered. The spreadsheet doesn't know, the contract terms are buried in a PDF, and the sub is calling about money owed at the worst possible moment.
Invoice arrives in the accounts inbox. You open it, find the PO number, check the lines, match the GST, push to Xero. Multiply by fifty a week. The 1960s called.
What we do differently
Most vendors sell. We land. The difference is structural, not marketing.
Subcontract Register
Issue, manage, claim, vary, retain. Every subcontract in one register, linked to its head contract and its cost code structure.
Issue subcontracts from awarded tender data, no re-keying from the BOQ- Schedule of values attached to every subcontract, with claim status visible
- Sub variations linked to the head contract VO they support
- Retention rules set per contract (flat, sliding, or Bank Guarantee in lieu)
- Final account close-out with the full claim and variation history
Excel subcontract trackers, Word subcontract templates, the question 'which version is the signed one' with no good answer.
Sub Claim Certification
Certify claims against actuals on site, not against the sub's word. The audit trail stays on the claim record, not in your inbox.
- Sub claim arrives, matched to the subcontract and the schedule of values
- Certify line by line against actuals, with the variance visible
- Two-stage approval routing (CA certifies, PM approves)
- Retention held automatically per the contract rules
- The audit trail (who, when, against what evidence) attached permanently
Excel sub claim trackers, certification by email, the spreadsheet that gets rebuilt every claim cycle.
Variations (Client and Sub linked)
Client VOs and sub VOs in one register. Recoverable work visible the moment it's logged. The final account trail builds itself.
- Client instructions logged with date, source, and contractual notice tracking
- Sub VOs flagged against the HC VO they roll into
- EOT (Extension of Time) tracking against contractual timeframes
- Variation register exportable to defend a dispute
- Approval routing on VOs above the project threshold
Disconnected variation registers per project, email chains as the variation paper trail, the recoverable position calculated by memory.
Retentions Register
Knows your head contract. Sliding schedules, PC and DLP dates, Bank Guarantee swaps. The release calculations happen automatically.
- Set retention schedule per subcontract: flat, sliding (10 percent, 5 percent, 1.75 percent), or Bank Guarantee
- PC and DLP dates anchored to the head contract milestone
- Bank Guarantee tracking with expiry dates and alerts
- Variation register exportable to defend a dispute
- Cross-project retention exposure ranked
Per-project retention spreadsheets, missed PC release dates, the manual calculation that breaks when a contract uses a different schedule.
Invoice Inbox and Accounting Sync
Invoices read automatically, matched to PO and subcontract, exceptions flagged. You stop matching, you start exception-reporting.
- Invoice PDFs read on receipt, line items extracted
- Matched to the PO and the subcontract, with the variance visible
- Self-billed tax invoices (RCTI in Australia, BCTI in New Zealand) generated with the right GST treatment
- Exceptions routed to you for review, matches push straight through
- Bidirectional Xero and MYOB sync, with the audit trail preserved
Manual PDF-to-PO matching, Outlook drag-and-drop into the accounting folder, the half-week per month spent reconciling statements.
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Used by CAs at ANZ commercial builders.
Mid-tier commercial builders. Contracts between half a million and a hundred million. CAs runningthree to ten subcontract registers at once.
Contract Administrator, ANZ mid-tier builder
Senior CA, NZ commercial builder
Contract Administrator, ANZ commercial builder
One register. One audit trail.
One source of truth.
Thirty minutes, no install, no commitment. We'll walk through a workspace running the subcontract register, the claim certification, and the retention math on a project your size.
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