General contractor software on the prompt payment clock

Ask what it takes to be a general contractor in Canada and there is no national answer, only four provincial ones that disagree with each other.

Quebec requires a Régie du bâtiment licence for anyone carrying out construction work for others, with subcategories from 1.1 to 1.10 covering general contracting, and every worker on site needs a certificat de compétence in one of the twenty-five CCQ métiers. Ontario and British Columbia do not name general contracting on their compulsory trade lists at all. Same trade, same continent, opposite regimes — and the licence number that is mandatory on one side of the Ottawa River appears nowhere on the other: the number belongs on every invoice.

What is the same everywhere is that money now moves on a statutory clock, and that the money passing through you is not entirely yours.

The clock runs in days, and it starts with a proper invoice

In Ontario an owner pays within twenty-eight days of a proper invoice and a contractor passes payment down within seven. Since 1 January 2026 a deficient invoice is deemed proper unless the owner objects within seven days — twenty-eight days, seven days, and a new invoice rule. Alberta runs the same pair, with its own definition of what makes an invoice proper: twenty-eight days, seven days, and a proper invoice.

A clock that short cannot be run from an inbox. In Zirko a project status is one you name yourself — tendered, awarded, substantially performed, released — including its language and its document template, with no preset stages to squeeze into. A status change sets off a rule you wrote: a mail to the owner, a reminder to the office, the people involved assigned, files requested.

The log records every message with its trigger, its recipient and its moment, so the same notice cannot go out twice, not even if the run starts twice. A dry run goes through the same functions and sends nothing.

The money above you belongs to the people below you

Amounts received for a project are trust funds, and directors and officers who assent to a breach can be personally liable — directors are personally liable. That is personal exposure created by a company decision, which is a good reason for every payment and every sub invoice to sit on the job rather than in a general ledger line nobody can trace back.

Zirko issues document numbers on the server from ranges with no gaps. An issued invoice can no longer be changed: a correction is a credit note or a cancellation with its own number. Incoming documents have their own list beside the outgoing ones, so what you owe your subs and what the owner owes you are readable in the same place.

Job costing per cost type, while the job is still running

A job in Zirko carries its costing next to its documents: total costs against the estimate, and a bar per cost type. Labour, material, equipment, subcontracted work and other, each against its own budget, each red when it passes the line, with the recorded hours underneath.

A service is an assembly of those cost types — labour minutes from a wage group, material, equipment, subcontracting — so the estimate and the actuals are built from the same parts. That is the difference between finding out in March and knowing in week three.

Hours taken into a document carry an origin marker and leave the selection, so the same hour cannot reach two invoices. Twelve time types sit behind that, each with its own effect on target hours and the leave account, and nine of them can be requested from the phone.

What it does not do

No tender portal, no bid levelling, no critical path scheduling and no BIM. No dispatch board that optimizes routes or forecasts capacity, no map of your trucks, no clock-in with location checking. Zirko files nothing with a registrar, computes no lien or payment deadline and holds no register of licences. Nothing in it is decided by a language model — the automation is eleven fixed rules you switch on one at a time.

Plans are counted in office seats, with field licences for anyone who only works on site, and the mobile application comes with every office seat. Nothing is metered by jobs per month. Fourteen days free, the full range of functions, no payment details, and the trial ends by itself.