We spent thirty years teaching the construction industry to stop working from stale information.
Nobody builds off a drawing set that is two weeks old anymore. Nobody walks a jobsite with a roll of paper under their arm hoping it matches what the design team issued on Tuesday.
We moved documents to the cloud. We moved models to the cloud. We connected issues to RFIs to cost, and we got very good at one specific idea: the information in front of you right now should reflect the project as it actually is right now.
That idea worked. Ask a superintendent when they last hand-checked every reference in a drawing set.
Then look at how the same company tracks labor.
On a typical job, labor is the largest cost category a contractor manages, and in a FMI Labor Productivity Study, project examples showed labor running 42% to 52% of total cost. It’s also usually the last major cost category still reconstructed after the fact, tracked on spreadsheets and timesheets days or weeks after the work happened.
It is also, on most jobs, the only major cost category still reconstructed after the fact.
A foreman finishes the week, sits in a truck on Friday afternoon, and tries to remember what eight people did across four cost codes over five days. Some of it is right. Some of it is close. The parts that were unusual, like the two hours a crew spent on work that was clearly out of scope, are the parts most likely to be lost, because they were the hardest to remember and the least like everything else on the sheet.
That paper travels to the office. It gets keyed in. It reaches accounting. By the time job cost reports reflect the week, the week is three weeks gone.
Everyone in the business knows this. What is strange is how normal it feels. We would never accept a three-week lag on drawings. We accept it on the biggest number on the job without much comment, because the alternative has always seemed to require the one thing the field will never absorb: more paperwork.
The pressure is not letting up, either. In AGC of America's 2026 outlook, 82 percent of contractors reported difficulty filling hourly craft positions, the highest share in three years, and workforce shortages have become the leading cause of project delays. When crews are the constraint, knowing how crew hours are actually being spent stops being a back-office nicety.
This is the part that gets designed wrong most often.
The instinct is to solve a data problem by asking for more data. Add a second app. Add a form. Add a reporting step at the end of the day. The office gets what it needs and the field absorbs the cost, which is exactly the arrangement that produced the Friday afternoon truck cab in the first place. Adoption collapses, the data arrives incomplete, and the office quietly goes back to the spreadsheet.
The workable version runs the other way. You do not add a capture step. You replace the paperwork that already exists with one entry that produces all of the outputs.
A foreman opens a phone, pulls up the crew, allocates hours against cost codes that came down from the project's actual budget, and notes what got installed. That one entry becomes:
The foreman is doing less work than before, not more. That is the only version of this that survives contact with a real jobsite.
Two details matter more than they sound like they should. It has to work in Spanish, because a meaningful share of front-line leadership in this industry works in Spanish. And it has to work with no signal, because parking garages, mechanical rooms, and rural highway jobs do not care about your architecture. For crews who share equipment or leave phones in the truck, a shared kiosk on the job covers the rest.
The obvious benefit is speed, but speed is not really the point. A current number is an actionable number. A stale number is a postmortem.
You find out while you can still do something about it. Production variance against budget shows up in period rather than at month end. A crew running behind on a cost code is a staffing decision on Wednesday. The same information a month later is a lesson learned.
Extra work reaches the invoice. T&M and change order work is where contractors quietly lose money, and usually not because anyone disputes that the work happened. Research from Clearstory and Dodge Construction Network found that 77 percent of specialty contractors have written off change order work as bad debt, that 83 percent say the change order process hurts their cash flow, and that the most common reasons GCs reject or reduce a claim are disputed pricing and insufficient backup documentation. The same research clocks the average trip from a signed T&M tag in the field to a priced change order request at 22 days, with another 26 days waiting on GC approval.
Captured at the moment it happens, with crew, hours, quantities, photos, and a signature attached, extra work stops being a negotiation and starts being a record. One project engineer at Champion Specialty described the before state plainly:
“Prior to Rhumbix we had $1M cost in T&M, only $600k invoiced, and no one could decipher what was in there.”
Project Engineer, Specialty Contractor
The office stops doing data entry. When field data arrives structured and cost-coded, payroll changes character. Payroll manager at Commercial Contracting Corporation, puts it at roughly 60 hours a week saved, and describes a department that "transformed from being a data entry department, to a quality control department." Customers at ArchKey report better than 90 percent improvement in payroll accuracy, and Turner reports cutting payroll processing time by 93 percent.
Foremen get their week back.
“Those hours saved add up. It's crazy. 40 hours a week just for foremen alone.”
Project Engineer, Specialty Contractor
That is time going back into running work.
Next year's bid gets better. Actual unit rates by crew and cost code, collected consistently across projects, are the closest thing this industry has to a feedback loop on estimating. Most contractors have never had them at that resolution.
The labor record holds up later. Multi-union classifications, shift differentials, per diem, and prevailing wage rules are configured into the point of capture, so the record is built as the work happens rather than reassembled during an audit. Certified payroll still runs in the ERP, where it belongs. What changes is the quality of what it has to work with. DPR runs more than 11,000 California clock-ins a month this way.
Field data that lives in its own system is a better version of the same problem. It has to move.
Rhumbix works in two ways with Autodesk Forma Build. Projects, budgets, and cost codes come down into the field app, so crews code against the office's structure instead of a parallel list somebody reconciles later. Actual labor cost, change management, forecasting, and documentation flow back up, including T&M tags that land in cost management and can be associated with potential change orders. Production tracking connects to Assemble and Navisworks, which is what turns installed quantities into progress against the model rather than a number in a spreadsheet.
And because plenty of contractors run their financials somewhere else, Rhumbix integrates with the construction ERPs already in place, including Sage 300 CRE, Viewpoint Vista and Spectrum, Foundation, COINS, and Penta.
The net effect is not a new dashboard. It is that the crew hour stops being an isolated fact and starts behaving like every other piece of project information: current, structured, and connected to the decisions it should be informing.
We made documents current. We made models current. We made cost and schedule current. The work itself, the people actually installing it, stayed on paper longer than anything else. It happens to be the most expensive part of the job.
Closing that loop does not require a new theory of construction. It requires giving front-line leaders a tool that costs them less time than the clipboard did, and then treating what they capture as first-class project data.
Starting October 7, 2026, bundling Rhumbix with Autodesk Construction Operations gets you 20% off. If you're purchasing both together for the first time, you get 20% off Construction Ops. If you already have Construction Ops and are adding Rhumbix, you get 20% off Rhumbix.
The offer runs now through January 31, 2027.
Talk to your Autodesk account team to see what the offer looks like for your business, or visit rhumbix.com to see what your own labor data looks like when it is current.
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With this Rhumbix and Autodesk Construction Operations Bundle offer, customers save 20 percent instantly off the Autodesk global suggested retail price (SRP), excluding taxes.
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