How Colliers New Zealand Uses Mastt as a Single Source of Truth for Cost Control

Background

Colliers is one of New Zealand’s leading project management consultancies, overseeing major residential and hospitality developments across the country. With more than 1,200 apartments under construction at any given time and projects spanning multiple offices, the team needed a way to maintain accurate, real-time financial visibility across every engagement.

The Challenge: Manual Workflows and Information Gaps

Before adopting Mastt, cost data was fragmented. Spreadsheets were the primary tool, but they introduced risk: files could be manipulated, versions diverged between team members, and reconciling a QS report with the PM’s cost tracker was a manual, error-prone process.

The most dangerous problem, however, was the lag. When a change instruction is issued on a construction project, it can take weeks or even months for the contractor to return a priced claim. During that gap, the project team is making further commitments without knowing the true financial position.

"The danger, and what we see, is the lag between the instruction, the forecast cost, and the contractor’s claim being received, which can be months. Therefore, your decisions are made to commit or instruct costs without knowing the true extent."
‍_{Andrew Bowden}

Colliers needed a platform that could centralise all contract and cost data, provide an auditable and tamper-proof record, and give the team the ability to forecast costs before contractor claims arrived.

The Solution: Mastt as the Single Source of Truth

Colliers adopted Mastt as their centralised project cost management platform. Rather than replacing the quantity surveyor’s detailed evaluation, Mastt sits above it, giving the project management team an always-current, consolidated view of every contract, instruction, variation, and payment across a project.

• ‍Centralised contract tracking: Every contract on a project, not just the head contractor, but all consultant appointments, is registered and tracked in Mastt.‍
• Tamper-proof financial records: Unlike a spreadsheet, Mastt pulls through the true cost from the underlying data. The numbers cannot be manually overridden to “make a number work.” This gives both the PM team and the client confidence that reported figures reflect reality.‍
• Proactive cost forecasting: When a change instruction is issued, and a contractor’s priced claim has not yet been received, the Colliers team assigns a budget estimate to that instruction inside Mastt. This ensures the forecast cost always reflects known commitments, even before they are formally valued, closing the dangerous information gap.‍
• Streamlined reporting: Mastt feeds directly into monthly cost reports and PCG reports. Colliers often produces two versions of a report, one shared with the contractor and one for the client’s eyes only, which includes placeholder sums for instructed-but-unpriced items. Having a single data source reduces the manual reconciliation that previously consumed hours each month.

"So for us, Mastt allows us to have a single source of truth, as all the costs of instructions are in one centralised location, including payment claims. Because it’s not an Excel file, it can’t be manipulated to make a number work. It kind of pulls through the true cost."
‍_{Andrew Bowden}

The Results: Streamlined Reporting and Enhanced Client Trust

Since adopting Mastt, Colliers has seen tangible improvements in how their project teams manage cost:

• ‍Always-current financial position: Project managers can see committed costs, forecast costs, and remaining contingency at any point in time, rather than waiting for a month-end reconciliation cycle.‍
• Reduced reconciliation effort: With all contracts in one platform, the team spends less time stitching together data from spreadsheets, email, and document management systems.‍
• Greater client trust: Clients receive financial reports backed by a system of record, not an editable spreadsheet. The integrity of the data strengthens the PM’s advisory role.‍
• A foundation for predictive analytics: Colliers is now exploring how the historical cost data captured in Mastt, detailed registers of where money was spent against each change, across dozens of projects, can be used with AI to identify cost trends and preempt blowouts on future projects before they occur.

“It's not just the contract with the contractor. It's all the other contracts you hold with the consultants. They take just as much management and getting them all in one place is quite important because there's variations with the consultants scope services. So having a single platform that we can go to is good.”
_{Andrew Bowden}

Looking Ahead

Andrew Bowden and the Colliers team see the next frontier as moving from reactive cost tracking to predictive project management. By analysing patterns across completed projects, which categories of change drove cost growth, at what stage, and on which project types, they aim to put mitigation measures in place before costs are incurred, not after.

“I know [Mastt is] pushing into it, but a lot of what I’m looking at is using the historical projects we’ve done and the information from them, because every detailed register shows where cost has been spent against each change. We’re then trying to use that to predict the pathway for the next project.”
‍_{Andrew Bowden}

With Mastt’s growing AI capabilities, including automated upload and classification of invoices, contracts, and variations, the platform is positioned to support this shift. The data is already there. The next step is surfacing it.