Gnosis

That Sunday-night payment-claim ritual — spreadsheet, calculator, double-checking every rate? Gnosis reads the claim workbook in whatever layout it comes in, reconciles it to the schedule of rates, and gives you a draft to review. → gnosis.ltd

Every civil contractor knows the feeling: a variation that never made it into the claim because there was no time to write it up. That's a timing problem, not a discipline one. Gnosis captures and prices variations as the work happens, then asks you to confirm. → gnosis.ltd

We're starting a short series showing Gnosis doing the actual work — no slides, just the app. First up: setting up a contract in about two minutes. Built by a civil contract administrator after 27+ years on site.
▶️ https://youtu.be/7ayRG9HEgGw

Building in public — week 3.

Next week we record a 90-second walkthrough of a full NZS 3910 payment claim in Gnosis: schedule of rates through to certification, real app, no slides.

What part of the payment-claim process do you find clunkiest? Tell us and we'll build the video around it. gnosis.ltd

NZS 3910 and AS 4000 feel like cousins raised apart. Same instincts, different rules — certification windows, terminology ("Engineer" vs "Superintendent"), and time bars that bite differently.

Gnosis is jurisdiction-aware from the start: pick NZ or AU on the contract and the terminology, timeframes and currency all follow. Because "close enough" across borders is how claims get lost. gnosis.ltd

Here's a variation the way it actually arrives — messy.

A contractor's payment claim includes an overspend against a variation that was only ever instructed verbally. No VO number, no pricing — just a line in a spreadsheet. Under NZS 3910 that's a problem for everyone.

Gnosis catches that line against the approved variation register, flags the overspend before certification, and prompts you to draft the variation properly. Defensible records, before the money moves. gnosis.ltd

Most people on a civil contract have never read NZS 3910 cover to cover — it's 200-odd pages and you've got a job to run.

But three things in it quietly decide who carries the risk: the Engineer's role (independent certifier, not the Principal's agent), variation timeframes (the clock starts at instruction), and payment claims under the CCA (miss the window or the form and a valid claim goes unpaid).

We wrote a plain-English guide for people who actually administer these contracts: https://gnosis.ltd/what-is-nzs-3910-plain-english-guide-2026/

Twenty-seven years on civil sites taught me the same lesson over and over: the job rarely goes wrong on the engineering — it goes wrong on the admin. Payment claims that don't reconcile. Variations buried in email. Clauses flagged six weeks too late.

So I built the tool I always wanted. Here's the short version of why: https://youtu.be/gSdPpBaJc5s

Gnosis is a contract administration assistant for civil engineering — built for NZS 3910 (NZ) and AS 4000 (AU). Free trial, no credit card: gnosis.ltd

"Why wouldn't I just use a generic PM tool or a spreadsheet for contract admin?"

Generic PM tools are built for tasks and deadlines — useful for programme, but contract admin is a different machine: payment claims, variations, retentions, EOTs, RFIs, NCRs, each with a defined shape under NZS 3910 / AS 4000.

And Excel's infinite flexibility is the problem, not the solution — it's how you end up with fourteen versions and a claim certified off the wrong one.

Gnosis is purpose-built and deliberately constrained: it only lets the work happen the way the standard says. That constraint is the feature.

14-day trial → app.gnosis.ltd

The variation that eats your margin usually isn't a big dramatic one. It's the $63,936 of rock excavation everyone "agreed on site" and nobody wrote down.

Three months later it lands in a claim and becomes a fight — who authorised it, against which clause, priced when? The work was fine. The authorisation trail was a conversation.

Gnosis moves every variation through claimed → authorised → priced, and builds the audit trail as it happens. So the work is never the thing in dispute.

Worked example → https://gnosis.ltd/variation-orders-nzs-3910-worked-example/