Construction software

your soft + hard costs can be thrown into a Northspyre (used to use textura) and the construction management/accounting team tracks all of that and manages for you, not the development team.

Using a product like Northspyre is exactly what I'm talking about. As to who manages it: roles tend to be pretty fluid across companies in the industry, so I'm sure it falls to different people depending on the company. That said, I believe that Northspyre and Rabbet are designed to be used by people on a typical development team- not the CEO or a senior partner, necessarily, but certainly a development associate level person. Also, I think one of the main purposes of those programs is to make draw requests happen with a click of a button- you shouldn't need to export stuff to excel for that.

Even at the large dev scale, you run a GL report from your accounting software and pivot table it. You don't need a software to do that for you…. 

Agree that this is one way to do it. But, in my experience, it's not real-time and it's more labor-intensive than it sounds. Maybe it depends on how much the accounting department has its shit together. When you're spending tens or hundreds of millions in hard costs and millions in soft costs, having a program that makes the dev cost tracking real-time and seamless could be worth a fair amount of money.

I’m honestly more confused what your point is now than my original post, where I was asking the OP who’s using the software. If a development team is properly staffed, and also has a construction management oversight team since these are massive projects you’re talking about, the process typically falls on the construction accounting team to process all bills and payments against the sub contracts and their forecasted total cost. Those sub contracts forecasted spend is what the entire budget gets built on. BUT, before there are forecasted numbers in a software program to even track something, it starts with an excel model with a built up underwriting model that describes what the total budget for the development is. The teams then go out and negotiate the contracts against that budget, the built up total budget we discussed before, before they get input into these accounting systems. Always, these contracts tell you the total negotiated price for the total amount of work needed, and bills actuals against the forecast and reduces the “to-be-let” accounts.. This is all managed in the construction teams accounting software, like Textura (now owned by Oracle). This specific software is to manage change orders and other forecasted changes, and it’s most helpful at the sub level for the accountants to track because it’s an accounting program, not a development software. The accountants then post all payables from the month on the GL and you can quickly extract that data and pivot table it against each subs forecasted total with forecasted total, total spend to date and to be let... No system needed what so ever from the development team on top of the construction accounting software. You have the same accounting software with the rest of the development costs like marketing, legal, owners costs, etc, and you can effectively and precisely manage these devs up to the minute. The old school way I guess…