Most trade job software is built for a job that starts and finishes in a day. A build runs for months, collects thirty variations and gets paid in progress claims with retentions held behind them. That rules out the service-shaped tools. NextMinute is the NZ option built for staged work, Buildxact and Buildertrend lead on takeoff and estimating, and simPRO handles commercial projects.
A build is a long job, and that changes everything
Tradify, ServiceM8 and Fergus are excellent at a job that opens on Tuesday and closes on Tuesday. A 22-week renovation behaves nothing like that. One job record stays open for five months, absorbs 40 timesheet entries a week, 60 supplier invoices, a dozen subcontractor bills, and a running argument about what was in the original scope.
So the questions worth asking a vendor are different. Can I see estimated against actual on a live job, this week, by cost code? Can I raise a purchase order against a budget line and have the supplier invoice land back on it? Can I bill a stage without closing the job? If the demo cannot show those three on a real job, the tool is service-shaped and you will end up running the build in a spreadsheet beside it.
Consent paperwork the software has to survive
Restricted building work brings obligations that live outside the invoice. Before the work starts, the owner has to give the council written notice of every licensed building practitioner engaged on it. On completion, each LBP who did or supervised part of it must provide a record of work to both the owner and the council, under section 88 of the Building Act 2004. Failing to provide one is a disciplinary matter for the LBP, not a filing annoyance.
Then there are the consent inspections. Foundations, pre-line, and the rest, each booked with the council, each producing an inspection record that has to survive until the code compliance certificate is issued and well beyond. Your subbies are generating their own paperwork against the same address at the same time: the electrician's certificates, the gasfitter's two certificates, the plumber's as-builts. All of it belongs in one place keyed to the consent, not scattered across six inboxes.
No mainstream tool automates the council side. What good ones do is give the job record a document set that survives the build, so that when the code compliance certificate application asks for the lot, it is one folder rather than an archaeology project. Judge candidates on document structure and search, which sounds dull and is the thing you will use every week for five months.
Progress claims run on a legal clock
The Construction Contracts Act 2002 makes a payment claim a formal document with mandatory content, and it starts a clock. Serve a valid payment claim and the payer has 20 working days, or the shorter period your contract sets, to respond with a payment schedule. Miss that response and the claimed amount becomes a debt due. Residential claims also need the prescribed Form 1 notice served with them.
That clock is the arithmetic nobody does. Worked example, a builder claiming monthly on a five-month job.
- Work through to 31 March. On paper it takes 9 working days to pull the timesheets, supplier invoices, subbie bills and variations together into a claim, so it is served on 14 April.
- The payer then has 20 working days to schedule, taking it to about 13 May.
- From the last day of work to the day the money is due, that is 9 plus 20 working days, roughly six calendar weeks of your money sitting in someone else's account.
- Cut the assembly from 9 working days to 1, which is what a tool that carries timesheets, materials and variations into the claim does, and you have pulled 8 working days out of every claim.
- Five claims across the job is 40 working days of cash brought forward, and none of it is a discount you had to give anyone.
Retentions add a second, longer clock behind that one. Since 5 October 2023 retention money withheld from subcontractors is held on trust with tighter rules about access, so a builder now sits on both sides of a retention ledger: money held back from you by a head contractor, and money you hold back from your own subbies. A tool that tracks retention per contract is doing real work. A spreadsheet doing it is a liability waiting for a bad month.
Variations are the margin, and they get lost verbally
The single most expensive habit in residential building is agreeing a change on site and writing it down later. Logged as it happens, with the labour and materials attached and the client's acknowledgement on it, a variation is revenue. Remembered in October about a conversation in June, it is a discount you did not intend to give.
NextMinute is explicit about this shape of work: variations logged on site as they happen, purchase orders raised against the job, takeoffs imported from your estimating software or quantity surveyor, and progress claims issued from the job record with the timesheets, materials and variations already attached. It is also the NZ-built option, which matters for the Xero side.
What the estimating-led tools do differently
Buildxact and Buildertrend come at builders from the takeoff end rather than the job end. You measure off the plan on screen, build a priced estimate from a supplier catalogue, and the estimate becomes the budget the job is costed against. For a builder whose bottleneck is quoting new work rather than running the site, that ordering is the right way round.
| Tool | Built around | Pricing shape |
|---|---|---|
| NextMinute | Running the job: variations, progress claims, back-costing, POs | Crew bands rather than per seat, from $199 a month for 3 to 9 people and from $349 for 10 to 14 |
| Buildxact | On-screen takeoff and estimating that flows into the job budget | Tiered subscription with extra users charged separately; check the vendor page for current NZ figures |
| Buildertrend | Estimating plus client-facing project management and selections | Tiered subscription quoted in US dollars; check the vendor page, and check what it costs after any introductory period |
| simPRO | Multi-phase commercial projects, purchasing and progress billing | Quote only, with no published price anywhere |
The crew-band difference is worth doing the sum on. A six-person building crew on a per-user tool at $48 a user a month pays $288 a month, or $3,456 a year, and gets a product that cannot issue a progress claim. The same crew on NextMinute's 3 to 9 band pays $199 a month, or $2,388 a year, and gets one that can. That is $1,068 a year cheaper for the tool that fits the work, which is the rare case where the right answer is also the cheap one. The band detail sits in the NextMinute pricing post, and the general comparison in the four-way roundup.
When you do not need software at all
A builder running one or two jobs at a time on charge-up, with a client who pays monthly against a simple claim, does not need any of this. Xero plus a decent estimate spreadsheet plus a phone camera covers it, and the money saved buys a better scaffold. The same is true of a builder whose work is small alterations under the restricted building work threshold, where the record of work obligation does not bite.
Three signals say the free setup has run out. Two live sites at once, because you can no longer hold both cost pictures in your head. Fixed-price contracts, because charge-up forgives a slow variation habit and fixed price does not. And holding retentions from subbies, because that is a trust obligation and a spreadsheet is a poor place to keep one. If you hit those and still want to stay off a subscription, the comparison against a build of your own is in what custom automation costs.
Choose it on your worst job, not your best
Take the messiest job you ran last year, the one with the variations argument, and demo every candidate against that job instead of a tidy one. Ask each vendor to produce a progress claim from it, with the variations attached, while you watch. Your subcontractors have their own version of this decision, covered in the electricians' post and the plumbers and gasfitters' post. If you want a second opinion before you sign a two-year term, book a free 30-minute call.