The Hidden Cost Nobody Puts in the Budget

Every commercial manager I've worked with has a war story that goes something like this:

"We had a legitimate $340k variation. The PM knew about it. The super knew about it. It was all over the emails. But by the time anyone formally wrote it up, we were 8 weeks past the notification window under the contract. Principal knocked it back. We wore it."

Swap the number and the contract form, and this is a story you've heard — or lived — on every project you've ever worked on.

Industry benchmarks suggest contractors lose between 5% and 10% of contract revenue to poor contract administration. On a $50M contract, that's $2.5M to $5M. Not because the work wasn't done. Not because the entitlement didn't exist. Because the paperwork, the notices, and the evidence weren't pulled together in time.

And yet, when budget conversations happen, the conversation is about the cost of the tool, not the cost of the status quo.

Where the Money Actually Leaks

Across 45+ contractors using Hevi — Tier 1 civil primes, mid-tier underground mining contractors, plant and drill & blast specialists, infrastructure EPCs — the same leak points show up over and over:

1. Missed time bars. Under AS 4000, AS 4902, NEC3/4, FIDIC, and most bespoke heads of agreement, you've got a specific number of days from the event to notify. Miss it, and your entitlement is gone regardless of merit. Most contractors are tracking time bars in someone's head or a spreadsheet that nobody opens.

2. Under-claimed variations. When the evidence is scattered across emails, site diaries, RFIs, drawings, and WhatsApp messages, the person writing the claim builds the lowest-risk version they can defend. Which usually means leaving 20-40% on the table.

3. Delay costs you can't prove. Extension of time claims live or die on contemporaneous records. If your site diary says "cleaned up site — 7 crew" instead of documenting the principal-caused delay that forced the cleanup, your EOT is indefensible.

4. Contract awareness gaps. Your site team is making commercial decisions every day — accepting instructions, signing dockets, agreeing to scope changes verbally. If they don't understand what the contract says about notices and instructions, they're creating exposures you'll wear at month-end.

5. Handover and onboarding losses. When a commercial manager leaves mid-project, the contractual history in their head leaves with them. New starters spend 3-6 months rebuilding context that should have been systematised.

What the ROI Calculator Actually Measures

The calculator isn't a sales prop with a pre-baked number at the end. It's a diagnostic.

You plug in:

• Your annual contract revenue
• How many active contracts your commercial team is managing
• How many commercial/contract admin FTEs you have
• Rough estimates of time spent searching for information, preparing claims, and managing variations
• Your estimate of the dollar value of claims and variations you've lost or written down in the last 12 months

The calculator gives you back:

• The time cost of your current contract admin process
• The estimated revenue leakage from missed or under-claimed entitlements
• A projected ROI if that leakage was reduced by a conservative margin
• The payback period on a platform like Hevi

Some contractors run it and realise the number is smaller than they thought — their team is actually dialled in. Good. That's useful to know.

Others run it and find the leakage number is larger than their entire IT budget. Also useful to know.

Either way, you get a number that's yours, based on your inputs. Not a vendor slide deck.

Try the calculator now →

Three Ways to Use the Output

1. Build a business case internally. If you're a commercial manager or contracts manager who knows your current process is bleeding, the calculator gives you the dollar figure you need to get finance, IT, and the GM aligned on doing something about it.

2. Benchmark across projects. Run it for different project types — underground mining vs surface civil vs infrastructure. You'll often find one sector of your business is running significantly hotter on claims leakage than another.

3. Pressure-test any contract admin tool. Whether you're looking at Hevi, a SharePoint build-out, a CMS, or a dedicated claims platform — if the vendor can't help you reduce the leakage number, the ROI isn't there. Use it as a filter.

A Note on What This Isn't

This calculator doesn't replace a proper commercial review. It won't pick up culture issues, capability gaps in your team, or contractual positions that are structurally unfavourable from day one.

What it does do is force an honest conversation about the cost of the status quo — which, in my experience, is the conversation most contractors aren't having often enough.

Built by People Who've Lived the Problem

I spent a decade in commercial roles at Downer and PYBAR before starting Hevi. The calculator is anchored in the numbers I used to pull together for monthly cost reports, variation trackers, and CCN registers — not in theoretical SaaS ROI logic.

The assumptions baked into it are conservative. If anything, they understate the leakage on most contracts.

Ready to See Your Number?

The calculator is free, no email gate, no sales call required. Takes two minutes.

Calculate Your Contract Admin ROI →

If the number surprises you — in either direction — book a 20-minute call and we'll walk through what's driving it.

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