The project report
builds itself

Every cycle somebody rebuilds the project status and cost to complete by hand, out of a cost export, a draw package and one spreadsheet that disagree. This is the brief that hands that job to Claude. Copy it, paste it into a new Claude conversation, and attach the files you already pull. It asks what your cost codes and your budget column mean before it builds anything.

Two files on the same project, each with a column called budget. One is the pro forma the equity was raised against. The other is the current budget with the approved change orders already in it. Nobody catches it, and cycle after cycle the contingency looks healthier than it is, because every overrun was measured against the wrong budget.

The numbers live in the accounting system, the contractor's draw package, the cost consultant's report and a spreadsheet on one person's desktop, and the only thing able to reconcile them was somebody who knew whether a given line was committed, spent or still an allowance. Claude reads those files directly, asks what your budget column and your cost codes mean before it combines anything, and holds every project at once. The rebuild becomes a paste, and the person who knew what the codes meant writes it down once instead of doing it every cycle.

• The brief itself, in one block you copy or download, so what you hand Claude is exactly what you have read.
• The questions it asks before it builds anything, including the one about committed, spent and forecast that most cost to complete errors trace back to.
• The quality gate it holds itself to, and the rule that stops it filling in a cost code your files never carried.

A development manager attaches the cycle's cost export, the contractor's draw package and the internal budget file. Before a single project total is produced, the run reports that two change directives sit in the schedule of values with no price anywhere in the files, that one trade is still carrying its pro forma allowance because it was never bought out, and that the interior finishes line is being compared against the pro forma rather than the current approved budget.