Real estate
Contractor RA bills arrive with claimed quantities that must be checked against the approved BOQ, against previously certified quantities, and against the measurement records. Each line item requires cross-referencing across several documents in different formats, and a large bill runs to hundreds of line items.
The consequence of doing it quickly is over-certification, which is very difficult to claw back. The consequence of doing it thoroughly is that certification becomes a bottleneck, which strains contractor relationships and delays site progress. Most projects live uncomfortably between the two.
A reconciliation agent that reads the submitted bill, the approved BOQ and the certification history together, checks each claimed line item, and produces an exception report identifying every item that does not reconcile and by how much.
The engineer reviews exceptions. The agent does not certify anything.
Model and surface
Claude with document processing, delivered as an upload-and-review tool where a bill is submitted and the exception report comes back.
Connectors
Document sources for the approved BOQ, the submitted RA bill, prior certified bills and measurement sheets, typically Drive or the client's project management system. Where the ERP holds the certification history, that is read directly.
Skills
The reconciliation logic is encoded: item code matching including the description-based matching required when a contractor's line description does not match the BOQ description exactly, unit normalisation across the mixed units that appear in practice, the cumulative certification rules that determine what may be claimed this bill given what has been certified previously, the treatment of variations and extra items outside the original BOQ, retention and deduction rules, and the materiality thresholds that determine what is flagged as an exception rather than a rounding difference.
Data flow
The agent extracts line items from the bill, maps them to BOQ items, retrieves the cumulative certified position for each, computes the permissible claim, compares to the claimed amount, and classifies every discrepancy by type: quantity exceeding BOQ, quantity exceeding measured record, rate variance, unmapped item, or duplicate claim against a prior bill.
Critically, the agent reports its own confidence. An item it could not map with certainty is flagged for mapping rather than silently passed or silently rejected.
Human review
Absolute. The output is an exception report for a quantity surveyor or project engineer. No certification, no payment recommendation, no approval.
Governance
Read-only on source documents. Full audit trail from every flagged exception back to the specific line and document that produced it, which is what makes the output usable in a contractual dispute.
A bill of four hundred line items is uploaded. The agent returns twenty-three exceptions.
Nineteen are minor quantity variances within a tolerance the engineer accepts. Three are items claimed at rates that do not match the BOQ. One is a line item claimed in full that was already certified at eighty percent in the previous bill, which the cumulative check caught.
The engineer reviews twenty-three items with the source references attached instead of checking four hundred by hand, and the duplicate claim is caught before certification rather than after payment.
Exception-Based Review & Accelerated Certification
Description: Focus on discrepancies early to reduce cycle time and standardise reviews.
