No two of your jobs are the same.
The discipline that protects the margin can be.

Each selection carries its own allowance and its type, either prime cost or provisional sum, at the figure written into the contract inclusive of GST. When the client chooses an option, the difference against that allowance is calculated and shown as an over or under, on your screen and on theirs, and you get an alert naming the selection and the amount the moment the choice is made. Selections carry a due date, and anything still undecided past its date is counted as overdue so the pre-construction list does not go quiet. What the system does not do is turn an over-allowance choice into a variation by itself. That stays a decision you make, because whether an upgrade is charged, absorbed or renegotiated is a commercial judgement about a client relationship, not an arithmetic result. The system makes sure you know, in time to make it.

A variation has two layers. Underneath is the internal build-up, priced lines pulled from real takeoff measurements, budget lines or catalogue products, each stamped with where it came from and linked back to the budget line behind it. Over the top is the client-facing summary, composed separately in the language a homeowner reads, and the editor will not let you send a variation whose client rows do not reconcile to the sell amount, so the two cannot quietly disagree. You send it, the client opens a single-use link that expires after thirty days, reads it, and types their full name to sign. When it is approved three things move together. The contract sum increases by the variation total and the approved variations figure updates alongside it, so original contract sum plus approved variations always equals the current contract sum. The variation lines land on the locked budget grouped by cost code, with an entry written to the budget audit log. And the variation appears in the claims screen as ready to claim.

It is credited at cost, not at your sell price. When you build a variation that removes work, the lines come across as negative quantities priced at cost with markup set to zero, so the client is credited what the omitted work was going to cost you and margin applies only to the new work. That is a deliberate convention rather than a setting, and it exists because the alternative quietly funds every scope swap out of your margin. On a custom home where a client changes their mind six times over a year, each change removing something and adding something else, the difference between crediting at cost and crediting at sell is the difference between a job that holds its margin and one that does not.

The design being different does not make the rates different. A bespoke house is still framed, plastered, tiled and painted using the same items and the same labour rates as the last one, and that is where a catalogue of items and assemblies earns its place. You are not reusing the design, you are reusing the pricing knowledge, which is the part that walks out the door when an estimator leaves. Supplier price lists can be brought in as CSV, spreadsheet or PDF and matched against your existing items, with the matcher normalising the way suppliers rename things between lists, so timber described three different ways resolves to one item rather than three. Confident matches apply, uncertain ones go to a review queue rather than being guessed, and every price change is written to an append-only history you can read back.

Pre-construction is where a custom job is won or lost, and the practical problem is that it lasts a year and generates paperwork nobody will remember the shape of by the time site starts. Documents live in one place with revisions kept as a chain rather than overwritten, so the drawing someone priced from still exists exactly as it was. Selections carry due dates through that period so the decisions that hold up an order surface as overdue rather than as a phone call from a supplier. The cost position exists from the moment the budget is locked, not from the moment the first invoice arrives. And Oryn reads the documents as they come in, extracting what it finds and citing the page it came from, so the specification is searchable rather than being a folder somebody has to remember the contents of.

Be careful here, and raise it with us early rather than assuming. The contract record holds cost-plus terms, meaning the contract type, your margin percentage, the billing cycle and an optional maximum budget as a guaranteed maximum price. What is built out fully is the fixed-price side, where the claim schedule runs at agreed percentages of the contract sum against build stages. VIABUILD does not currently generate a cost-plus claim automatically from the actual costs incurred in a billing period, so on a cost-plus job the cost position, the committed costs and the variation workflow all work as described and the billing itself is more manual. If most of your work is cost plus, that is a real limitation and it should be part of your decision rather than something you discover in month two.

It does not run payroll and it does not cost labour hours to jobs from timesheets, so if you self-perform heavily and need labour actuals flowing into job cost from time recording, that gap matters. It has no contingency mechanism separate from your cost codes, so contingency is budgeted as a line like anything else rather than drawn down through a dedicated register. It has no retention handling, which matters more on commercial work than on domestic contracts but is worth knowing. It is not built for civil work or commercial tendering. And Oryn is not a chatbot and does not have opinions about your job. It reads plans and paperwork, extracts what it finds, cites the document and page every value came from, and never commits anything touching money or a contract without a person confirming it.