General contractor software: retainage on three calendars

A general contractor is a bank that also builds. You pay for material and labor weeks before the draw arrives, you hold back part of what you owe your subs, and someone holds back part of what they owe you. The margin on the job is real. The cash is a schedule.

Retainage is a different number in every state

Ten percent in Texas. Five percent in New York. Five percent on California public work. One contract clause, three different legal ceilings, and a subcontractor who has read the statute in their state even when you have not — retainage by state sets out where the caps actually sit.

Payment deadlines run on their own calendars on top of that, with different penalties attached, and federal work is different again: 7 days in California, 7 days in Texas, 7 days in New York — and three different penalties.

Zirko computes none of these dates. The contract does. What Zirko does is put the date on the job with a status you named yourself and a reminder rule with a lead time and a text you wrote, logged with its trigger, its recipient and its moment — and nothing fires twice for the same case, even if the run starts twice.

The subcontractor file exists before the first check, or it does not exist

Get the W-9 before the first payment, not after the first information return — the reasoning is in get it before the first check, not after the first 1099. And whether that sub is a contractor at all is decided by tests that have nothing to do with what the agreement says.

In Zirko a supplier invoice reaches your firm's own inbox address and is read on your own device — structured XML first if the file has any, then the PDF text, then text recognition. Not one byte goes to an outside service to be read, and what is stored is what a human confirmed. The invoice then hangs on the job and on the vendor, moves through new, to be checked and released, and anything disputed stays recorded on the document. Certificates of insurance and signed agreements go in the job's folder tree, where you decide per folder whether the field sees it.

Job costing that shows what was left over, per cost type

Five cost types carry it: labor, material, equipment, subcontracting and other. Each has a markup for the company that an individual line may depart from, and Zirko works both directions — sell price from cost and markup, or the markup back out of a price you set. Contribution margin appears per line and per document, and a discount that pushes it negative is shown as negative rather than clipped to zero. Who may see the costing is decided by the role.

Afterwards the same five types carry the comparison: eight amount-bearing document types form the estimated side, recorded vendor invoices and consumption form the actual side, with the variance and an overrun marker. Delivery tickets, letters and correction documents stay out so nothing counts twice. The estimated side does not build itself — you decide which documents belong to this job. That is one more movement of the hand and, in return, a number that holds.

What it does not do

No payroll, and therefore no certified payroll reports: on federal work above the threshold those are weekly and the prime is answerable for everyone's, which is set out in Davis-Bacon — Zirko is not where that gets produced. There is no submittal or RFI log, no drawing markup, no bid invitation portal, no bank connection and no accounting posting. There is no bar chart inside a job and no critical path: dates live on the planning board, where the people who carry them out are listed.

Plans count office seats plus field licenses, never jobs per month. Fourteen days free, full range of functions, no payment details.