The AI resident engineer for public works.
CMLens reviews every contractor pay application against the contract, flags what is wrong with the dollar impact and the source, and drafts the review memo. Your engineer approves every flag.
Progress Payment Review
Contract, SOV, prior payments, change ordersEvery public project pays the contractor every month. Someone has to check it by hand.
On the owner's side, a resident engineer checks each pay application line by line in Excel and Word: quantities against the field record, percent complete, retention, stored materials, change orders and the payment clauses in the specs.
Per pay application
A senior engineer spends hours on a typical application and a full day on a large one. Junior staff take longer still.
Errors slip through
Front-loaded line items, stored materials billed twice, unexecuted change orders. Overpaid public money is hard to claw back.
Pay late, pay more
Late progress payments owe interest, sour the relationship with the contractor and seed claims.
The field record says 520 feet of pipe. The pay app bills 640. CMLens catches it before the check goes out.Built by a licensed professional engineer with owner-side construction management experience.
From upload to a signed review in one sitting.
Upload the package
The contractor's pay application with the contract's schedule of values, the last certified application, approved change orders and the payment clauses. PDF or Excel.
CMLens reviews it
Every line is checked against the contract. Each flag shows the line item, what is wrong, expected versus billed, the dollar impact and the exact source row.
The engineer decides
Approve, reject or edit each flag. Nothing finalizes until every flag has a decision. Out comes a review workbook with formulas and a memo ready to sign.
The checks a resident engineer runs, on every line, every time.
Written from California public-works practice, and applied against each agency's own specifications and payment clauses.
Measured, not promised.
We ran the live system on ten pay applications from one contract, with twenty errors planted by an engineer and an answer key it never saw.
Planted errors caught
Across ten applications, including two with no errors.
Per review
From upload to the engineer's approval screen.
Engineer-approved
No flag reaches the memo without a human decision.
Source on every flag
Every finding points to the document and row it came from.
Measured on a synthetic test set built to match real California public-works pay applications. Next: pilots on real pay applications with CM&I firms.
The owner's side of public works.
CM&I firms
Construction management and inspection firms that review pay applications for cities, water districts and transportation agencies. Review more contracts with the same team.
Public agencies
Sewer, water, stormwater and paving programs that want consistent, defensible reviews and fewer late payments.
Resident engineers
Spend the hours on judgment calls and the field, not on re-adding a continuation sheet.
Built to hold up in a dispute.
Public money needs a paper trail. CMLens keeps one for every review.
- A human signs every resultThe engineer approves, rejects or edits each flag before anything is final.
- Full audit trailEvery output records its inputs, the model used, the decisions and who made them.
- Your documents stay yoursEncrypted at rest, separated by organization, and purged on request.
- Your specs, your formsReviews follow each agency's payment clauses, not a generic template.
Send us your next pay application.
We will review it alongside your team and you compare the results. Pilots are priced per review, with no setup and no long contract.
Request a pilot contact@cmlens.com