"The money you expect to make is the money you will be making": How Empower Construction stopped financial leakage
Business name: Empower Construction
Location: NSW
"The money you expect to make is the money you will be making."
5000+
houses
Completed with lightweight cladding across Australia
100% visibility
Over project margins delivered in real-time
200+
workforce
Crews and trades delivering high-quality installs
About Empower Construction
Established: 2007
Integrations: Xero
The challenge
Before Nexvia, the business ran on spreadsheets and multiple systems stitched together. There was no central hub. Costs were hard to see in real time. Variations got missed. And for Brendan Corbett in Sales, there was no clean feedback loop between what happened on site and how the next job got priced.
"From a sales perspective, I can readily see what our projects end up at the end of a job and re-implement those processes into the front end of the quoting process. Before, I was running three or four different systems to get the same process through."
For Bryn Edwards in Operations, the previous job management system was limited. It gave a partial view – not the global snapshot he needed to see across an operation spanning multiple states and dozens of concurrent jobs.
"We saw limited capacity with what we had. It was struggling to give us a global view of everything happening in the business. What we really needed to see was where our money was and why we were making good profit on certain jobs. That's what fuelled the change."
Why Nexvia
Empower needed a solution that would work across both their office and site processes – and they took the decision seriously. After reviewing many of the leading construction management platforms on the market, they met with Nexvia.
The one-on-one demonstration was the turning point. The team were impressed with what the software could do and, critically, found it easy to use. That mattered – a system the whole team wouldn’t actually adopt wasn’t a solution.
But what really sealed it was the support model. Unlike larger offshore platforms, Nexvia offered a local team, an in-depth onboarding process, and ongoing support from people they could actually build a relationship with. For a growing business preparing to expand across states, that wasn’t a nice-to-have – it was the deciding factor.
That confidence proved well-founded. As Roshan Nazareth in finance puts it, the local team is available throughout the day, responsive by email or phone and follows through on requests.
"The people on the Nexvia team are very approachable and very contactable. The turnaround time to address issues is very quick. Someone listens to us and someone acts on our request - that's a very big positive for a software provider."
What changed with Nexvia
The shift was felt across the business. For Roshan Nazareth in Finance, the biggest change was simply having accurate numbers available immediately. Project margins are now visible at any point in a job. Purchase orders, bills and invoices all flow through Nexvia, then sync automatically to Xero – no double handling, no chasing data at month end.
Contractors log in directly to view purchase orders, submit bills against them and track payment status. That removed a significant chunk of operational load from the accounts function.
"The contractor forms part of my accounting team when they have the ability to log in and view the purchase orders issued to them. They can put their bills against those purchase orders, see what credit notes are against their invoices, see how much has been paid. That saves us a lot of operational and accounting time. All the invoices and bills we push into Nexvia at a project level get automatically transported across into Xero. At end of month, it's very easy to reconcile. There's never been any issue about data missing or getting lost."
For Bryn in Operations, variations had been one of the biggest sources of leakage. They used to be handled through email chains – logged nowhere, easy to miss and easy to lose before a job closed out.
"Before, variations weren't logged against a specific job. There was a lot of leakage - missed variations. Now everything goes against that one particular job and it's very easy to pick up before you close out. We've cleaned up a lot of leakage through our variations."
Defects follow the same logic. Site teams photograph them, assign them to the relevant contractor or crew, the system sends a notification and completed work gets uploaded back through the portal. The whole thing is visible in one place.
For Michelle Sampo, a Senior Contracts Administrator, the assemblies function changed how quotes get built. The previous system had no reliable way to track materials against a project. Now every component – by product type, material, trade – is broken down in the assembly, so the expected cost and profit are locked in at the quoting stage, not guessed at the end.
"With the reporting at the end of the project, we already know what profit we should be getting. At the very end we pull a report, see what we got, compare it to what we should be getting. That's a really good way for management to check what's happening."
Empower committed seriously to implementation from the start. They dedicated time and resources to staff training, provided feedback to the Nexvia team throughout and ran a six-month onboarding process before the full company-wide rollout. Getting everyone on board took effort – but once the software was live, the time savings and efficiencies spoke for themselves.
Why it matters
Empower Construction operates across multiple states, across dozens of concurrent jobs, with 100 to 150 people on the ground at any given time. At that scale, operating without real-time cost visibility isn’t a minor inconvenience – it’s a structural risk.
The old way couldn’t keep pace. Profit was being lost in variations that slipped through email chains. Reconciliation meant chasing data rather than analysing it. Quotes were being built without feedback from previous jobs. Each of those gaps costs money, and none of them were visible until it was too late to act.
Now they are. The relationship hasn’t stopped at implementation either – Empower regularly provides feedback and volunteers to test new features, making sure the platform keeps pace as the business grows into new regions.
Highlights
Achieved full real-time visibility over project costs and margins across 100–150 staff and contractors
Eliminated financial leakage by capturing and tracking all variations directly against jobs
Replaced spreadsheets and fragmented systems with one centralised platform from quote to completion
Enabled seamless Xero integration with automated syncing of invoices, bills and purchase orders
Reduced admin workload by allowing contractors to submit bills, track payments and manage POs directly
Created a closed feedback loop between project outcomes and future quoting to improve profitability
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