(Fort Hill LogiX: Greenville, SC)-- Since 2006, the construction auditors at Fort Hill Associates have worked on more than 1,600 capital projects for universities, health systems, and other clients. The work is unglamorous and high-stakes: reading the fine print, line by line, from thousands of payment applications and dense CMAR and GMP contracts, to find the clauses that didn’t match, the labor rates that didn’t reconcile, and the change orders that didn’t line up with the contract.

They also hit a wall.

Contracts got longer. Projects got bigger. And the hours needed to check every line of a payment application climbed past what any practice could staff. So Fort Hill did what few audit firms would: It turned its own bottleneck into a research project.

The result is Fort Hill LogiX, an engine built inside a working construction audit practice to do what the firm’s auditors do on every line item of a project’s documents. AI reads the documents. Fixed rules test each line against the owner’s contract. Every exception comes back with the page it was found on, and a certified construction auditor works through each one and signs off on the report before it reaches the owner. The owner makes the final call.

“We didn’t set out to build software. We set out to stop losing sleep over what a manual review might miss,” says Ruhtab Sahota, a certified construction auditor and founder of Fort Hill LogiX. “Once the engine could cross-reference a contract clause against a payment line against a labor rate in a single pass, reliably, we realized we had built something every owner needed, not just our own practice.”

Fort Hill LogiX operates as a separate, stand-alone company. Fort Hill Associates built it, is its first customer, and stands behind every report it produces.

“The best thing we could do for this technology was share it,” says Curt Plyler, a CFA charter holder, certified construction auditor, and co-founder. “We’ve spent 20 years earning trust one audit at a time. What we learned is that every owner with capital tied up in a project is carrying the same risk we were finding by hand. They should be able to see it the same way we do.”

The work follows the Construction Audit Professional Standards published by the National Association of Construction Auditors, which require sufficient data and records in support of every reported result. LogiX applies that requirement to every line item.

The engine was built to check every line. The company was built so no owner has to do it alone.