Replacing a 20-year Excel estate with a cost management platform
The situation
MDA Australia is a quantity surveying and cost management consultancy supporting construction projects nationally. Its operations ran on sophisticated Excel workbooks using VBA scripts and COM components capable of the calculations, but increasingly unworkable in practice.
Corporate security policies at client sites routinely blocked the macros, so workbooks shared with clients and contractors simply didn't run. Project details, cost structures and payment information moved between organisations as spreadsheet attachments, with the version control problems that implies. The architecture could not scale to multiple concurrent construction programs.
What we built
A custom Cost Management System on Dataverse and Power Apps, replacing the legacy Excel and VBA application entirely. It comprises three purpose-built model-driven apps covering programs and projects, construction cost management, and contractor payments.
Programs, projects and cost management
Financial-year budgeting and allocation tracking at program level, project requests and approvals, and lifecycle and construction-stage management. Beneath that sits the specialised quantity surveying layer: itemised construction elements, building rates and nominated supplier pricing, cost benchmarking, contractor-specific fee structures, normal and out-of-hours pricing, and project-value fee bands.
A CostX API integration connects specialist construction measurement to the platform, which is what made retiring the spreadsheets possible rather than merely desirable.
Contractor payments
Purchase orders, monthly claim periods, payment schedules and records, with claimed amounts, previous payments and outstanding balances tracked against the same project and budget data rather than in a parallel system.
External access, without a portal
Rather than building a conventional external portal, we built three model-driven apps, CMS Admin for MDA staff, CMS Client, and CMS Contractor, each exposing only what that audience is entitled to see.
External stakeholders access them as Microsoft Entra B2B guest accounts, with Power Apps per-app licensing and role-based security controlling data visibility. That licensing decision is what makes the model viable: per-app rather than premium across the external population is the difference between an affordable platform and one that costs more than the access is worth. Data is isolated between contracting parties who compete with one another.
Outcome
- 100+ external users, MDA’s clients and contractors, on per-app licensing
- 100+ client projects managed in the platform
- 3 purpose-built applications, each scoped to its audience
- Legacy Excel and VBA application fully replaced, integrated with CostX
- Clients and contractors work online instead of exchanging macro-enabled spreadsheets
- Ongoing managed support arrangement
Moving from our existing spreadsheet-based processes to a modern business application was a significant undertaking. Exhortek helped us navigate that transition with a clear understanding of our workflows and operational needs. Their attention to detail, technical knowledge and willingness to work through complex requirements made them a valuable technology partner.