Building work is written down in one place, changed in another, and paid for on trust.

Why I started Assurr

The information usually existed. The structure connecting it did not.

I have spent much of my working life around the places where plans meet reality.

Designing things. Teaching people how to make them. Running building projects. Managing contractors, suppliers, customers and operational systems. Trying to work out what was supposed to happen, what had actually happened, and what needed to happen next.

The same problem kept appearing in different forms. A decision might depend on a quotation in an email, a drawing somewhere else, photographs on somebody’s phone, a conversation nobody recorded, an invoice raised weeks later and a different understanding of what had originally been agreed.

Once two people have different accounts of the same project, reconstructing what actually happened becomes difficult and expensive, and damages trust.

The money was not really the beginning of the problem. It was the point at which everything that had happened before suddenly had to become a decision.

• Has this work been done?
• Was this included?
• Was that change agreed?
• Does somebody else need to decide?
• Is this payment now due?

I realised that making the payment mechanism better without improving the record underneath it would only solve part of the problem.

So Assurr became something broader.

It is built on a simple idea: the agreement, the work, the changes, the evidence, the decisions and the money should stay connected as a project develops.

The record should not just explain what happened afterwards. It should be useful while the work is happening, helping both sides understand what has been agreed, what has changed, what has been done and what happens next.

This creates greater clarity, better decisions and more trust throughout the project.

That is the system I wanted to exist. So I started building it.