About BuiltSum
BuiltSum is independent construction estimating and billing software for small and mid-size contractors: the 3-to-20-person subcontractor or general contractor who bids work from drawings, bills it monthly against a schedule of values, and gets paid slowly when a pay application comes back with a math error.
Why it exists
The same numbers get retyped four times on most jobs: once into the estimate, again into the schedule of values, again into every month’s pay application, and once more into the retainage invoice nobody remembers to send. Each retype is a chance to be a few cents off, and a pay application that is a few cents off is rejected, which costs the contractor another thirty days of financing the work. BuiltSum exists so the number is entered once and carried forward, penny-exact, from bid to final retainage release.
It is priced flat, with unlimited projects and free field users on every plan, because per-project caps and per-seat charges punish exactly the contractors the product is for. Plans and what each includes are on the pricing page.
How the numbers are checked
- Every calculation engine (pay applications, retainage, job costing, markup, the material calculators) is pure code covered by automated tests, including golden-file pay-application cases that must match to the cent.
- The 50-state retainage law table on the retainage calculator cites the statute for every row and links to its source. It is reviewed against the statute text and dated; it is educational, not legal advice.
- Material calculators state their formulas and assumptions on the page so a reader can check them by hand, and every whole-unit quantity rounds up.
- Competitor pricing and feature claims on comparison pages are taken from the vendor’s own live pages on the date noted, and are corrected when a reader tells us they changed.
What BuiltSum is not
BuiltSum is not affiliated with the American Institute of Architects. Its pay applications are AIA-style documents that present the same information as the G702 and G703 forms in an original layout; if your contract requires official AIA Contract Documents, buy them from the AIA. BuiltSum is not an accounting package (it syncs to QuickBooks Online instead), not a scheduling tool, and it does not claim that software can do your takeoff for you: the browser takeoff measures what you click.
Reaching a person
Support, sales and corrections all go to hello@builtsum.com. Details are on the contact page. The privacy policy and terms of service describe how accounts and data are handled.