Bid leveling ends at award. The eighteen months after it are purchase orders, vendor compliance, change order tracking and invoices that do not match what was ordered. Trueleveler runs that half of the job in the same workspace the leveling happened in — the commitment carries the quote you picked, and the vendor's compliance file, the change orders and the budget all sit on that same project.
Most AI construction tools stop at a verdict. Most project tools never produce one. Trueleveler does both after award — and it is worth being precise about which is which, because that difference decides whether anything actually moves.
An engine reads a document and returns a judgement. Change Order Review says whether the work was already in scope and what you should actually pay. PO vs Quote finds the unit price that walked up between the quote and the order. Contract Review flags pay-if-paid, liquidated damages and the notice deadline. These produce an opinion with the clause references behind it. They do not move money, and they do not send anything to anyone.
A record with real states that a person moves through. Award a quote. Issue a purchase order. Approve or reject a change order. Verify a lien waiver. Release retainage. Approve a payment above the threshold your organization set. These change what is committed, what is owed, and what you are allowed to bill — and the money-moving ones are capability-gated: awarding a quote and issuing a PO take procurement rights, and verifying a waiver, releasing retainage and approving a payment each take a finance capability of their own.
One action moves the quote you picked into the procurement pipeline as a live commitment at PO stage, and stamps every line on it as awarded so your bid history carries the real number instead of a retyped one.
Auto-numbered per project, line items with GL codes, tax and terms. Save it as a draft or issue it with a branded PDF, then watch it through Draft, Issued, Delivered, Invoiced, Paid and Closed.
Every committed item runs seven stages — bid, PO, submittal, fabrication, shipped, on site, installed — in the procurement tracker, with deliveries recorded against the ordered quantity, partials included.
Prequalification, certificates of insurance, bonds and lien waivers sit on the vendor record, not in a folder on someone's desktop. An unverified waiver blocks that vendor's retainage release.
Reviewed change orders land in a register at Submitted. Approve or reject them there — approving a cost-impacting one requires a cost code, and the value rolls into the current contract value.
Match the invoice against the issued PO, gate the payment behind a second approver above your threshold, and close out with warranties, the O&M index and a completeness-scored owner package.
Buyout is where a leveled bid stops being a spreadsheet and starts being money you owe. These are the actions that make that real — each one a state change on a record, not a report.
Award a received or leveled quote and it becomes a live procurement commitment at PO stage, with the vendor, amount and date carried across. Every line item on that quote is stamped as awarded, so Bid vs Actual later reads real awarded pricing rather than a spreadsheet someone rebuilt from memory. The action is permissioned — it takes a user with procurement rights.
Purchase orders are auto-numbered per project and carry line items with quantity, unit cost, GL code and label, plus a tax rate and payment terms. Save it as a draft while you are still negotiating, or issue it and generate the branded PDF the vendor gets.
Every purchase order moves through a real status lifecycle, cancellation included, and every status transition is appended to a per-PO timeline — the before status, the after status and the time it happened. The log is append-only by design, so nothing gets quietly rewritten. When somebody asks in month nine when it was marked delivered, the answer is on the record.
Bid, PO, submittal, fabrication, shipped, on site, installed. The long-lead switchgear and the door hardware sit in the same pipeline as everything else you bought, with the expected date tracked and drift visible before it becomes a schedule conversation.
Issued purchase orders and time-and-materials tickets roll up onto budget lines by cost code, so each line reads Budget, Committed, Actual, Forecast and Variance. Refresh it on demand, or let the nightly job do it. Source rows without a cost code land in an unmapped bucket rather than quietly disappearing.
Record what actually showed up: quantity received, quantity remaining, whether the shipment was partial, and whether it matched the PO. That is the record PO vs Invoice leans on when a vendor bills for a full delivery you only half received.
A compliance folder nobody reads is not compliance. The point of tracking a certificate is that something downstream refuses to happen when it lapses.
Score a subcontractor on insurance, bonding, safety EMR and licensing. The criteria auto-fill from what is already on file — their certificates, their bonds including surety A.M. Best rating and expiry, their EMR, their license expiry date — and a reviewer then sets the decision: approved, conditional or rejected, with a next-review date. The score is decision support. The reviewer makes the call. Background reading: the prequalification guide.
General liability, auto, workers' comp, umbrella, professional and pollution — each with its own limits and effective and expiry dates — plus the endorsement forms that actually decide a claim: CG 20 10 additional insured, CG 20 37 completed operations, CG 24 04 waiver of subrogation. The insurance tracker flags expiring and lapsed certificates against a per-record alert window, with Renew and Create Task on the row.
Upload the certificate PDF and the coverage fields fill themselves — limits, dates, additional insured and waiver-of-subrogation endorsements — instead of an admin keying a dozen-plus fields per sub. Where a Contract Review run exists on the project, the extracted limits are checked against that contract's insurance schedule.
Performance, payment, bid and warranty bonds recorded against the contract and vendor they cover, with surety name and A.M. Best rating, principal and obligee, bond amount and premium, and effective, expiry and release dates.
Conditional and unconditional waivers tied to the pay application or purchase order they cover, with through-date, amount, stated exceptions, notary detail, and who verified it. A rejected waiver keeps its reason.
Spend to date and year to date, open commitments, delivered-versus-on-time counts, their certificates, their quotes and their bid history — plus quality, commercial, schedule, communication and safety ratings you set per project.
A change order review that ends in a PDF is a second opinion. A change order log with no review in front of it is data entry. Here the review writes into the log, and the log is what moves the contract value.
Was this work already in scope? Is the pricing defensible? Change Order Review cross-references the original contract and returns an in-scope or out-of-scope verdict, a recommended amount, manipulation flags — bundled items, inflated overhead, incomplete backup — and the clause references behind them.
It produces the judgement. It does not route the approval to anyone.
The reviewed change order is written into the change orders tracker as a record at status Submitted, carrying its amount, recommended amount, verdict, impact type, schedule days and an assignee. Nothing has to be re-keyed from the PDF.
A person decides. Approving a change order with a cost impact requires a cost code first — the platform will not let un-costed scope quietly inflate your margin — and the approved value rolls into the current contract value. Rejections are recorded as rejections.
An approved change order is allocated to the budget line you coded it to, so job cost moves with the contract instead of drifting away from it over eight months of small approvals.
When an approved change order carries schedule impact days, schedule risk re-runs on the project. The time extension you agreed to stops being a sentence in an email nobody re-reads.
A signed time-and-materials ticket pushes straight into a change order, pre-filled from the ticket and entered at Submitted for the same review path as everything else.
Three engines compare the paperwork. One threshold decides who is allowed to pay it. Those are different mechanisms and it matters which one you are relying on.
Compare a purchase order against the quote it came from and surface unit-price creep, quantity mismatches, changed payment terms and silent scope substitutions — line by line, with a suggested redline.
Match an incoming invoice against the issued PO: partial-delivery overbilling, back-charges that were never approved, freight and handling lines absent from the PO, quantity mismatches — and a payment recommendation at the end of it.
Reconcile what a vendor billed against what they quoted — unit-price walk-ups, unauthorized line items, double-billed materials — and get a summary written to be attached to a dispute.
Set the threshold your organization wants. Above it, a payment cannot be marked paid until a different teammate with the approve-payments permission signs off — nobody approves their own. The requester, the approver, both timestamps and any rejection reason live on the record.
Record pay applications against the subcontract value plus approved change orders, with the retainage math recomputed on the server rather than trusted from the browser, a per-vendor held-retainage balance, and a draft-to-approved transition that posts the retention reclass to the ledger.
One gives a senior-PM narrative read — retainage drift, stored materials, front-loading, prompt-payment compliance. The other does the line-by-line reconciliation with a per-line approved or disputed decision that you finalise. Judgement and arithmetic are not the same job.
When the job hands over from estimating to operations, run PM Handoff: it pulls the Contract Review and Bid Scope Compliance results already sitting on the project — no upload step — into one brief: risk register, key contacts, scope clarifications, notice requirements and the decisions the incoming PM has to make in the first two weeks.
Prime contracts, subcontracts, PO masters and amendments, each with retainage percentage, payment terms in days, LD rate and cap, governing law, dispute resolution and notice address — moving Draft, Out for Signature, Executed, Amended, Closed. Each record can link back to the Contract Review run it came from.
Contract Review reads a subcontract clause by clause and flags pay-if-paid, liquidated damages, consequential-damages waivers, termination for convenience, indemnification breadth and flow-down — then a companion summary compresses it to a two-page field brief with payment terms, retainage, notice deadlines and insurance requirements. Not legal advice.
Every warranty persists with its term in months, start and end dates, product, CSI division and the vendor who owes it — so a call in month fourteen has an answer that does not depend on finding the submittal binder.
The closeout package assembles the warranty matrix, O&M index, as-built summary and punch state into one deliverable — with a completeness score and an explicit gap list, so you find the hole before the owner does.
After substantial completion, reconcile every awarded bid line against actual PO and change-order spend — a trade-level variance table with a win, on-target or overrun verdict per trade, and the change-order drivers grouped by reason. It works because the award stamped the winning lines on the way in.
You are going to find these out in week two anyway. Better you find them out now, in our words, while you can still decide whether they matter to how you run a job.
There is no engine that drafts a subcontract agreement from an accepted bid. The contracts register is a register: you record the executed agreement and its commercial terms, and it can link back to the Contract Review run behind it. If you were hoping to click "award" and get a signable subcontract out the other side, that is not what this is.
The award itself is real and permissioned — a user with procurement rights takes it, and the commitment and the bid history both update. What does not exist is a submit-for-approval step, an approver field, an award history table or an award notification. If your process needs two signatures before a scope is bought out, that conversation still happens outside Trueleveler.
Nothing shows awarded versus estimated by scope package, buyout savings to date, or a list of the scopes still to buy out. What exists is committed cost against budget by cost code, which answers a related question in a different unit. If the buyout log is the artifact your team runs on, keep running it.
There is no e-signature integration. The envelope record is a log of signature requests you sent somewhere else, kept so the status is visible next to the contract, and the "Out for Signature" status on a contract is one you set by hand. Nothing leaves the platform when you set it.
The insurance tracker flags expiring and lapsed certificates against a per-record alert window and gives you Renew and Create Task on the row. It does not email you sixty days before a policy lapses. If nobody opens the tracker, nobody gets told — so make the compliance review a standing agenda item, not a notification you are waiting for.
PO vs Quote compares a purchase order to the quote it came from. It does not create the PO. Change Order Review returns a verdict on a change order. It does not route it for approval. Every issuing, approving and releasing action on this page is a separate, deliberate, permissioned thing a person does — which is the design, not an omission, but you should know which is which.
Bring three quotes to a fifteen-minute call. We level them on screen, then show you exactly what happens to the winner.