Small and medium contractors lose money the same way every time: the overrun is already weeks old by the time it turns up in a month-end report. By then the concrete's poured, the invoice is in, and the conversation with the client is a much harder one than it needed to be.
Proper cost-control software exists, but it's built for firms with a full-time QS and a budget to match. For a two-to-ten person outfit, it's overkill — so the job ends up tracked in a spreadsheet that nobody updates until it matters.
siteMargin was built by Leon Mayo, who has spent more than a decade running construction projects in Cape Town. The metrics inside it aren't generic SaaS dashboard filler — they're the numbers that actually predict trouble on site: spend running ahead of physical progress, variance concentrated in one category, claimed amounts that haven't been certified yet.
It's deliberately narrow. It won't do your accounting, manage your programme, or replace your QS if you have one. It does one thing: tells you where the money is going wrong, early enough to do something about it.
Leon Mayo
Construction project manager, Cape Town · runs LL Projects · founder of siteMargin
Ten-plus years running jobs for contractors and their clients — the certificates, the retention arguments, the month-end where the overrun finally shows. siteMargin is the tool I kept wishing was on the table during those conversations, built for the size of outfit that never gets one.