Post-project costing takes a lot of time in project-based businesses, especially in trades and construction. Manually comparing estimates, incoming invoices and timesheets costs many hours. Still, the process is essential. It is the only way to see whether a job was economically successful, where margins were lost and which cost items were estimated incorrectly.

Chatbots are not suitable for this. The context window is often not enough for all documents, the analysis comes back unstructured and the results cannot be cleanly reused for future projects. In addition, sensitive business figures are sent to external servers with every request.

A dedicated AI application makes post-project costing reproducible. It analyzes every project according to the same rules, adapts to your cost-item structure and stores the insights permanently. For the next estimate, you immediately see what went wrong last time.

In the frontend, you upload the estimate and supporting documents: invoices, delivery notes, timesheets, PDF or Excel files. In the background, the AI classifies each file and uses OCR to extract structured content such as amounts, item descriptions and working hours.

Then the actual analysis begins. A system prompt ensures that every project is analyzed according to the same rules. The system creates a planned-vs-actual comparison with absolute and percentage drift, checks for missing documents and identifies likely causes such as higher supplier prices or underestimated installation hours.

Finally, the AI generates recommendations for the next estimate. A dashboard summarizes the results clearly and exports the report as a PDF or Excel file with one click. This turns manual rework into a systematic analysis completed in minutes instead of hours.