Construction Project Management Software for UK Contractors With CIS and RAMS

No single construction platform does everything a UK contractor needs. The products that dominate international shortlists, Procore, Autodesk Construction Cloud, Fieldwire and Bluebeam, manage drawings, site tasks and project cost well, but none of them lists Construction Industry Scheme (CIS) processing in its published feature set. The products that do handle CIS natively, Access Coins Evo, Eque2 Construct and Causeway's commercial suite, are UK construction ERP and commercial management systems, not field apps. Two specialist tools fill the gaps in between: Payapps for applications for payment and retentions, and HandsHQ for risk assessments and method statements (RAMS). Most UK contractors therefore end up running two layers, a project platform and a commercial or compliance layer, and the real buying decision is which combination covers the five UK-specific jobs without paying twice.

This guide sets out those five jobs, compares the products that were verifiably on sale to UK contractors on 6 August 2026, gives published sterling pricing where it exists and says plainly where it does not, and finishes with a checklist to take into demos.

The five jobs the software has to do in the UK

A UK contractor's software has to do five things that generic project management tools were never built for: CIS processing, RAMS production and sign-off, CDM 2015 documentation, payment applications under the Construction Act, and retentions tracking. Each is a legal or contractual obligation, not a preference.

CIS. Any business that pays subcontractors for construction work must register as a contractor under the Construction Industry Scheme, verify each new subcontractor with HMRC before paying them, and deduct 20 per cent from payments to registered subcontractors, 30 per cent from unregistered ones, and nothing where HMRC confirms gross payment status (gov.uk CIS contractor guidance, accessed 6 August 2026). Deductions are calculated on the labour element after materials, plant hire and VAT are stripped out. The contractor must file a return to HMRC by the 19th of every month, give each subcontractor a payment and deduction statement within 14 days of the tax month end, and re-verify any subcontractor not included on a return in the current or previous two tax years. A return one day late costs £100; a seriously late return or a wrong employment status declaration can cost up to £3,000. HMRC also requires commercial software, rather than its free online service, once you need to verify more than 50 subcontractors, and publishes a list of recognised CIS software suppliers on gov.uk. For software selection the test is simple: does the product verify, deduct, file and generate statements, or will your accounts team be re-keying into something that does? Those records also contain subcontractors' UTRs and National Insurance numbers, which is personal data your processing records need to cover.

RAMS. Risk assessments are a legal requirement, and employers with five or more staff must record the significant findings; method statements are the industry-standard way of describing how high-risk work will actually be done. Packaged together as RAMS, they are how principal contractors gate subcontractors onto site, and producing site-specific versions from a generic template is where hours disappear. The software job is a content library covering your trades, site-specific editing, distribution to operatives, digital sign-off capture and version control when the method changes mid-job.

CDM 2015. The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 make the principal contractor responsible for planning, managing and coordinating the construction phase, and specifically for preparing a written construction phase plan before work begins, keeping it under review, ensuring site-specific inductions and preventing unauthorised access (HSE, CDM 2015 guidance). A project must be notified to HSE on an F10 if construction work is scheduled to last longer than 30 working days with more than 20 workers on site simultaneously, or to exceed 500 person-days (CDM 2015, regulation 6). The documentation this generates, the plan, induction records, inspection records and the health and safety file at handover, has to live somewhere auditable, not in a site manager's inbox or an unmanaged cloud storage folder.

Payment applications and valuations. Under JCT and NEC contracts the money moves through a monthly cycle of applications, valuations and certificates, and the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 (as amended) hard-wires the deadlines. A payment notice must be given not later than five days after the payment due date, stating the sum considered due and the basis of calculation (section 110A, legislation.gov.uk); paying less than the notified sum requires a pay less notice served before the contractual deadline, and missing the notices means paying the sum applied for. The software job is deadline tracking against each contract's actual dates, a standard format for subcontractor applications, and an audit trail of what was applied for, certified and paid.

Retentions. A retention is a percentage of each payment withheld by the customer, with half typically released at practical completion and the other half after the defects liability period, usually 12 months, or 24 in house building. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy estimated that between £3.2 billion and £5.9 billion was held in retentions per year in England, with a central estimate of £4.5 billion in 2015 prices (BEIS retention payments impact assessment, October 2017). Its 2017 consultation closed without legislative change, so retentions remain a contract-by-contract fact of life. The software job is a ledger per contract of what has been withheld from you and what you are withholding, with release dates and an ageing view, because retentions forgotten are retentions lost.

What the UK construction market looks like in 2026

The context for all of this is an industry that is large, fragmented and financially fragile. There were 370,770 VAT or PAYE registered construction firms in Great Britain in the third quarter of 2024, and the value of construction new work reached £140,684 million in 2024 (ONS, Construction statistics Great Britain, 19 February 2026). Output has been recovering, growing 1.6 per cent in the three months to May 2026, the third consecutive three-month increase (ONS, 16 July 2026).

The fragility shows in the insolvency figures. Construction recorded 3,805 company insolvencies in England and Wales in the 12 months to June 2026, more than any other industry at 17 per cent of cases where an industry was captured, ahead of wholesale and retail (3,463), accommodation and food services (3,233), administrative and support services (2,196), professional, scientific and technical activities (1,930) and manufacturing (1,857) (Insolvency Service, 17 July 2026). That is why the payment application and retention jobs matter as much as the scheduling ones: for a subcontractor, a missed payment notice or an unrecovered retention is not an admin failure, it is working capital.

One name investigated for this piece is deliberately absent from the comparison. Buildertrend, a fixture of US software lists, now sells only by custom quote, presents its offer in dollars and pitches residential builders; nothing on its pricing page addresses any of the five UK jobs above (buildertrend.com/pricing, opened 6 August 2026).

Comparison table, who does which UK job

Pricing definitions matter here: "quote only" means the vendor published no price anywhere we could open on 6 August 2026, and a figure your sales contact quotes is a negotiated number, not a list price.

Procore, quote-only platform for mid-size and large contractors

Procore is a cloud construction management platform covering project execution, cost management, quality and safety, sold in the UK through procore.com/en-gb and used on more than 3 million projects globally (Procore, accessed 6 August 2026). It publishes no prices: its pricing page offers a custom quote shaped by company type and the products selected, with unlimited users, unlimited data and support included in annual contracts (procore.com/pricing, opened 6 August 2026). That unlimited-user model suits main contractors who want every subcontractor, consultant and client representative inside the system without per-seat arithmetic.

None of the five UK jobs appears in Procore's published product set, which is why UK deployments pair it with specialists. HandsHQ lists a Procore integration that files RAMS into Procore project documentation (HandsHQ G-Cloud 14 listing), and Payapps integrates with Procore Financials in real time, importing commitments and returning approved applications for payment (Payapps, October 2023). If you need one system of record for site and a UK-compliant commercial layer, this is the pattern, but insist on a written quote with renewal terms, because there is no rate card to anchor against.

Autodesk Construction Cloud, per-user pricing and a payments subsidiary

Autodesk Build is Autodesk Construction Cloud's project and cost management product, sold per user with sheet-based plans (550 sheets, 5,000 sheets or unlimited, per Autodesk's support documentation) and currently being rebranded as Forma Build, the name Autodesk's own store now sells it under. Autodesk's UK pricing page states per-user pricing with unlimited sheets included and an unlimited-user option through sales, but displays the sterling figure in its online store rather than on the static page (construction.autodesk.co.uk/pricing/autodesk-build, opened 6 August 2026), so check the store for the current number before budgeting.

The UK-relevant part of the Autodesk story is ownership. Autodesk acquired Payapps, the payment application platform described below, for $387 million in cash in February 2024 (Autodesk SEC filing, 2024). Autodesk Build itself does not list CIS or Construction Act workflows in its published features; Payapps is where those live in the Autodesk portfolio, and it remains sold as a separate product. For BIM-led contractors already on Revit and Docs, Build plus Payapps is a coherent pairing; for a contractor with no Autodesk estate, it is two purchases, not one.

Payapps, payment applications and retentions from £32 a month

Payapps is purpose-built software for applications for payment, used by contractors and subcontractors in the UK and Ireland to submit, assess and certify applications, variations and retentions in a standard format, with reminders keyed to payment notice deadlines under the Construction Act (payapps.com/uk, accessed 6 August 2026). It is the one product in this comparison with fully published UK pricing at the small end: subcontractor plans cost £32 a month for one contract, £85 for five, £140 for ten and £270 a month for unlimited contracts, or £35 per application on a pay-as-you-go basis, all with unlimited users (payapps.com/uk/pricing-subcontractors, 6 August 2026). The main contractor side is quote only.

Its retention module tracks percentage-based, maximum-value and tiered retention structures, ties release requests to completion and defects liability settings, and produces a retention ageing report across contracts (payapps.com, retention features page). Payapps states that its UK platform handles £6.8 billion in applications for payment a year on average (payapps.com/uk). It integrates with Procore Financials and with Access Coins, so it slots into either of the ecosystems above. For a £2m subcontractor whose real pain is getting paid, this plus a decent field app is arguably the highest-value £32 a month in this article; the figure to weigh it against is what one missed pay less notice costs.

Fieldwire by Hilti, field management from a free plan to $89 a user

Fieldwire is a field management app, plans, tasks, punch lists, forms and photos, owned by Hilti and priced transparently in dollars: a free Basic plan for five users, three projects and 100 sheets, then Pro at $39, Business at $64 and Business Plus at $89 per user per month, billed annually, with RFIs, submittals and change orders reserved for the top tier (fieldwire.com/pricing, opened 6 August 2026; the site prices in US dollars, with local currency shown at checkout). For a trade contractor that mainly needs drawings and task tracking on phones, the free tier is a genuine starting point rather than a demo.

Fieldwire's published plan comparison covers field and project management; CIS, RAMS libraries and Construction Act payment workflows do not appear in it. Its custom forms can carry site checklists and inspections, but there is no UK compliance content behind them. Treat it as the site layer in a two-layer stack, not the system of record for money or statutory documents.

Bluebeam, the drawing and document layer

Bluebeam Revu is PDF markup, measurement and document collaboration for construction, priced per user per year in dollars: Basics at $260, Core at $330, Complete at $440 and the AI-focused Max at $590, an introductory price (bluebeam.com/pricing, opened 6 August 2026). UK estimators and quantity surveyors use it for takeoffs, drawing comparison and tender markups, and its Studio sessions handle multi-party design review.

It makes this comparison because it is on real UK desks, but be clear what it is not: Bluebeam is a document tool, not a project management system, and none of the five UK jobs appears in its published plans. Its cost per seat is modest; the discipline is stopping it becoming an unofficial document management system in which uncontrolled RAMS revisions circulate as marked-up PDFs.

HandsHQ, RAMS from £275 a month

HandsHQ is UK-built RAMS software: a content library of risk assessments organised by trade, site-specific editing, digital signatures, approval workflows, COSHH assessments and CDM 2015 construction phase plans, used by more than 1,500 companies (handshq.com, accessed 6 August 2026). Teams pricing is published: Small from £275 a month for up to 10 users, Medium from £550 for 25 users adding approval workflow and the Procore and Simpro integrations, and Large from £750 for 60 users adding a risk register, all billed annually plus a set-up fee (handshq.com/pricing, 6 August 2026). Its G-Cloud 14 listing prices the service at £2,500 a unit a year (Digital Marketplace, April 2024).

The value case is time per document: producing a professional, site-specific RAMS pack from a maintained library in minutes rather than cloning last month's Word file. The Procore integration files completed RAMS into project documentation automatically. For a contractor whose RAMS output is a few documents a month, £275 is hard to justify; for one gating dozens of subcontractor packs through review every week, it is an audit trail as much as a time saving.

Access Coins Evo, construction ERP with CIS built in

Access Coins Evo is The Access Group's construction ERP for UK and Ireland contractors and housebuilders, bringing financials, job costing, procurement, payroll and project control into one platform, with automated CIS processing, bank reconciliation and cost value reconciliation listed among its capabilities and Vistry Group and Thames Tideway among named customers (theaccessgroup.com, accessed 6 August 2026). Pricing is quote only. Access Fonn, its mobile-first project management product, captures CDM records, safety forms and inspections on site and feeds Coins Evo, and Access ConQuest covers estimating.

Two buyer-relevant facts. First, Access EasyBuild, the ERP more than 1,000 construction businesses bought, is no longer being developed; Access now points EasyBuild prospects to Coins Evo (theaccessgroup.com EasyBuild page, accessed 6 August 2026), so if EasyBuild was on your shortlist, the product you would actually be sold has changed. Second, Payapps integrates with Access Coins for application for payment workflows (Payapps, July 2026), so the ERP does not force you out of a specialist payments tool. This is the natural home for a £50m-plus main contractor or housebuilder consolidating systems; it is more system than a £5m subcontractor needs.

Eque2 Construct, CIS and job costing on Sage for smaller contractors

Eque2's Construct sits on top of Sage accounts, Sage being the finance system a large share of small UK contractors already run, and adds construction-specific contract management: job costing, subcontractor orders, applications and payments traceable per contract, and CIS compliance with automated HMRC verifications and deductions (eque2.co.uk, accessed 6 August 2026). Eque2 positions Construct for small and medium contractors, says implementation takes less than ten days for its Sage Accounts packages, and sells on one-year contracts. Pricing is quote only.

The pitch is pragmatic: if your accounts are already in Sage 50 or Sage 200, Construct adds the CIS engine and contract ledger without a finance system migration. That makes it the counterpoint to Coins Evo, an incremental step rather than a re-platforming, and a common landing point for the £2m to £20m contractor whose spreadsheet-run CIS has become a liability. The constraint is the same as the strength: it is a commercial and compliance layer, and site teams will still want a field app alongside it.

Causeway, estimating and commercial management for civils and infrastructure

Causeway Technologies is a UK construction software company with more than 3,000 customers including over 1,000 contractors, strongest in civils, infrastructure and highways maintenance (causeway.com, accessed 6 August 2026). CausewayOne Estimating is used by more than 400 organisations, and its Commercial Management product handles cost capture across labour, plant, materials and subcontractors, cost value reconciliation and forecasting, with cost structures that match NEC contract requirements, a genuine differentiator for contractors on NEC frameworks, where applications for payment must follow the contract's data structure. Causeway also runs an e-invoicing network, relevant as the government's mandate for structured VAT e-invoicing from April 2029 approaches (announced at the November 2025 Budget). Pricing across the suite is quote only.

Causeway suits the infrastructure and civils contractor, particularly on NEC forms, and the highways maintenance sector where its job management product dominates. It is not the obvious choice for a small building contractor on JCT minor works.

A buyer's checklist that survives the demo

Requirements first, demos second. Write down which system will be the record for each of the five jobs before any vendor call, because "we integrate with that" is where double keying hides. If the answer is two products, plan the joins like any multi-vendor arrangement, with a named owner for each interface.

• CIS. Ask whether the product appears on HMRC's list of recognised CIS commercial software suppliers on gov.uk. Watch a live verification, a deduction calculation on an invoice with materials, and a monthly return filed. Ask how it handles the re-verification rule and more than 50 subcontractors.
• RAMS. Have your own supervisor, not the salesperson, produce a site-specific RAMS on a phone, capture a signature, then revise the method and check what happens to the superseded version.
• CDM 2015. Ask where the construction phase plan lives, how induction records attach to workers, and what the F10 and health and safety file export looks like at handover.
• Payments. Check deadline reminders are driven by each contract's actual payment terms, not a generic calendar, and that the audit trail shows applied, certified and paid amounts side by side.
• Retentions. Ask for the retention ageing report in the demo. If the vendor has to build it in Excel, the module does not exist.
• Pricing. For quote-only vendors, get year-two and year-three pricing in writing before signature, and benchmark per-user costs the way you would any per-user service. Compare per-user models against unlimited-user models using your real headcount including subcontractors.
• Exit. Confirm you can export CIS records, RAMS history and payment application archives in CSV or PDF, and what happens to your data after termination. HandsHQ, for instance, documents a two-year retention then deletion; ask every vendor the same question, keep your own backups of anything statutory, and read the contract for the same red flags you would in any IT agreement.

Where each product fits

If you are a subcontractor around £2m to £10m, the highest-value moves are Payapps' published plans for applications and retentions, HandsHQ if RAMS volume justifies £275 a month, Fieldwire's free or Pro tiers for site coordination, and Eque2 Construct if your Sage-based CIS has outgrown spreadsheets. If you are a regional main contractor in the £10m to £50m band, the decision is which layer leads: a commercial system with CIS at the centre (Eque2, or Access as you grow) with a field app on top, or a project platform (Procore, Autodesk Build) with Payapps and HandsHQ closing the compliance gaps. If you are a main contractor or housebuilder above £50m, the shortlists are Coins Evo and Causeway for the ERP and commercial core, Procore or Autodesk for project execution, and Payapps either way for the payment chain. In every band, the products doing the statutory jobs, CIS, RAMS, payment notices, retentions, should be chosen first, because they are the ones a tribunal, an HMRC review or an adjudicator will ask about.

Sources

This article draws on UK government and regulator publications opened on 6 August 2026: HMRC's Construction Industry Scheme contractor guidance on gov.uk, the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 and the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 on legislation.gov.uk, HSE's CDM 2015 guidance, the BEIS retention payments consultation and impact assessment, ONS construction output and annual construction statistics, and the Insolvency Service's company insolvency statistics of 17 July 2026. Product capabilities and prices come from the vendors' own published pages: Procore, Autodesk Construction Cloud, Payapps, Fieldwire, Bluebeam, HandsHQ (including its G-Cloud 14 listing on the Digital Marketplace), The Access Group, Eque2 and Causeway, plus Autodesk's SEC filing on the Payapps acquisition. Prices were checked on 6 August 2026 and will change; treat every quote-only figure you are given as negotiable.