HomeHow it works

Setup and onboarding

We do not send you a login. We send you an engineer.

Most software arrives as a web address and a password, and then waits for you to fill it in. Civil Limitless arrives with a civil engineer who fills it in for you — your rate book, your live projects, your bill format, your team.

Book a demo Download

First call

30 minutes

On the phone. No slides, no deck.

Engineer at your office

Week 1

He reads your Excel files and your bill format.

Working on your own jobs

Week 2

Your data is in. Your team is being trained.

After that

Ongoing

A person you can call, and updates inside the app.

These are the six steps set out below, in the order they actually happen.

Why we work this way

Software does not fail in a construction office because it is bad. It fails because nobody has time to set it up.

You have seen it happen. A tool is bought, a login arrives, two people open it, and by the third week the office is back on Excel — because Excel already has the numbers in it.

So we take all three of those off your desk.

We do the week of work first — your rate book, your projects, your formats — before you are asked to use anything.
We load your live jobs, not a demo file, so the first screen you open already has your own numbers on it.
We train each role separately, so the app does not depend on one person remembering everything.

The engineer who sets it up has run estimates and bills himself. He is not reading from a script — he is showing you how he would do your job in the app.

The three ways it usually dies

Nobody has a spare week

Loading a rate book, setting work categories and stages, writing the consumption formulas for your mixes, matching your bill format — that is a week of somebody's careful attention. That somebody is already running three sites.

The app stays empty, so Excel wins

An empty app is a demo. A demo cannot beat a spreadsheet that already holds your quantities, however good the demo was on the call.

One person learns it, then leaves

The estimator never switched over, the billing engineer never logged in, and the site team was never asked. When the one trained person moves on, the tool goes with him.

None of those are about features. They are about the first month. That is the month we handle.

The plan

Six steps, from the first call to a team that is actually using it.

Nothing here is a surprise. It is the same plan for every company we set up, so at any point you know what we need from you and what happens next.

Setup and training are part of the licence on the Company and Developer plans — not a separate bill.

See what each plan includes

Your side of it

What we need from you is small, on purpose.

Everything on this list is time out of somebody's week, so we keep the list short. Five things, and about two hours of one person's attention spread over the visit.

No IT person No server to buy No cleaning your Excel first No internet at site

Everything else is our work. Matching each item to its clause, the consumption formulas for your mixes, work categories and stages, QC checklists, user accounts and who may see what — you do not have to prepare any of it.

Your rate book — or just one estimate

CPWD 2023 already ships inside the app with 4,060 items. If you follow a state PWD book or your own company rates, hand us the PDF or the Excel. If neither is to hand, one finished estimate is enough for us to build your item library from.

1 file

One live project

A job that is actually running, not a closed one — its BOQ, its measurements and the bills you have raised on it so far. We would rather set you up on real work than on a sample.

1 job

One bill you have already sent

This is how your format gets set — your header, your columns, your abstract, your signature block. After this every RA bill and tax invoice prints the way your client already expects.

1 PDF

Your terms, in plain numbers

GST rate, retention or security deposit percentage, TDS, performance guarantee, mobilisation advance and how you recover it. Tell us once; every bill after that carries them and works them out on its own.

5 minutes

About two hours of one person's time

Somebody who knows how the office really bills — usually the billing engineer or the owner. Not two hours in one sitting; a few sittings across the visit while the engineer works.

2 hours

The result

By the end of week two, this is what is on your screens.

Not a trial account with sample data in it. Your business, in the app, with the work you had running before you met us.

In the office

Your rate book is loaded, with the words you actually say on site mapped to clauses — type "Footing PCC" and the clause, unit and rate arrive on their own.
Your live project is in the Measurement Book, item by item, each one carrying its clause, unit, rate, work category and stage.
Your BOQ and your RA bill print in your format, with your company name on the header and your GST, retention and TDS already set.
The consumption formulas match your mixes, so the Bill of Materials and the steel schedule give real numbers from day one.

On site, and with your people

Logins are created for your team, project by project, with read or write set module by module — nobody sees more than they should.
The site app is on your site team's phones, tested on your own site, working with no signal and stamping every photo with location and time.
Each role has been trained on your live job — estimator, billing engineer, site engineer, store keeper — not on a demo file.
You have a support engineer's number, plus a written guide on every screen and the full course built into the software.

If you run several sites or a larger team, training usually runs into week three. We would rather tell you that now than promise you a Friday.

Bringing your work across

Your old estimates are not thrown away. They are read.

The worry we hear most often is "we will have to type it all again". You will not. Smart Import reads the estimate you already made in Excel and matches each line to a clause in your rate book — and shows you every match before a single row is saved.

The rate book is chosen first

Quantity comes from your sheet; clause, unit and rate come from the book you pick. The import refuses to start until a book is selected, because the wrong book would put wrong rates through the whole project.

It reads the sheet as it is

It finds the header row on its own and works out which column is which — even when the headings are odd or misspelt, like "Particulers", "Lengh" or "Quntity". Your sub-rows, your F1 and F2 sub-headings and your deduction blocks are kept. For a really unusual layout there is an AI Parser mode that reads the grid instead.

You see every match on screen

The preview lists each row with the heading it read, the quantity, the unit, the SOR number it matched, the work category, the stage and the material formula. Tick and untick line by line.

Nothing is written until you press Import

On one real estimation file, 145 items were read and 124 of them found their clause on their own. Untick what you do not want, import the rest, and correct the odd one by hand. Walking away from the preview changes nothing.

Your rate book comes across the same way. Import it from a PDF — with an AI parse if the book is a messy scan — or from Excel, then pick the correct rate column in the preview. Re-importing the same book is safe: clause numbers already in the app are skipped. Once it is clean we take a backup of it, so that work never has to be done twice.

This is the same match happening for one item as you type it. Smart Import does exactly this, for a whole sheet at once.

Training

Each person is trained on the part they actually use.

There is no all-day session where everyone sits through everything. The estimator learns the Measurement Book, the billing engineer learns the bill, the store keeper learns the gate — each of them on your live project, with your own numbers on screen.

Press F1 on any screen Every screen carries its own written guide, and the Buttons & Fields tab lists every control on the screen you are looking at, live. Nobody has to remember what a button does.

A 34-lesson course, inside the software It builds one project from an empty app to a finished, billed job, in the order the work actually happens — in English, Hinglish and Hindi, so language is never the reason someone gives up.

Ask a question in plain words The Ask AI tab answers step by step from that same manual — the app's own screens and buttons, not a general search of the internet.

Nothing can be broken while learning Everything deleted anywhere in the app goes to the Recycle Bin and can be restored. A new user can press things without fear, which is most of what learning software is.

Who gets trained on what

See every module

If you get stuck later

You will still have a person to call.

Setup is not the end of it. When the first job under a new rate book lands, when a new engineer joins in March, or when you take on a kind of work you have never billed before — the same team picks it up.

Call the support engineer

A construction person who knows the screens, not a ticket queue. Usually the same team that set you up, so you are not explaining your business again.

Updates arrive in the app

Signed updates that you accept from inside the software. You see what changed before you apply it, and there is no reinstall and no downtime.

New kind of work, new setup

A first tender under a different department's rate book, or your first project where you are selling flats — we sit with you and set the new part up, the same way we did at the start.

See everything support covers

Bring one estimate to the call.

Thirty minutes. We will run your own sheet through the app while you watch, and tell you honestly whether it is worth setting up for you.

Book a free demo Download