A 600-page manual nobody has time to read.
Institutional tenders are not won on price alone; they are lost on the clause nobody got to. What matters on this kind of work is whether a finding can be defended — to a consultant of record, to an owner’s rep, and eventually to whoever is arguing about the change order. So this page is mostly about evidence.
Every finding cites both sides
A finding that says “possible fire rating issue” is worth nothing on an institutional job. A finding that quotes Section 08 11 00 requiring a ninety-minute assembly, quotes Sheet A-601 showing an unrated leaf, and names both, is a question you can send to the architect this afternoon.
That is the whole design constraint: the deterministic engine finds it, cites it on both sides, and the model is only allowed to explain and draft around what was found. It never gets a vote on whether there is a finding. On work where a hallucinated exclusion taken to a subcontractor would end the relationship, that distinction is the product.
The audit also reports what it could not read — a refused sheet, a scan too coarse to trust, a jurisdiction whose local amendments are not applied yet. Treat a clean run as “nothing obvious”, never as “compliant”.
Which code, exactly
Institutional work crosses jurisdictions, and the same check does not give the same answer in two of them. Eight code packs ship today; the audit reports under the article numbers of the one your project is in, and tells you the depth it is reading at before it shows you a single finding.
| Pack | Rules | Reports under |
|---|---|---|
| Ontario | 105 | OBC 2025, AODA, O. fire code, Toronto zoning, TGS |
| Florida | 16 | FBC Residential, incl. HVHZ applicability |
| New York City | 16 | NYC Admin. Code Title 28 |
| United States | 12 | IRC 2021 baseline |
| Canada | 9 | NBC 2020 baseline |
| British Columbia | 7 | BC Building Code 2018 |
| California | 5 | CRC 2022 |
| England | 4 | Approved Document K |
Every pack is currently at baseline depth — model-code requirements checked, local amendments not yet applied. We say which, and why, on Regions & rate packs, where you can also see the same stair checked under five different codes.
The clause that pays for the year
On a school board package, a non-standard indemnity provision or an unusual liquidated-damages clause is the kind of thing that is obvious once someone points at it and invisible until then. The tender risk pass reads the whole manual and surfaces the clauses that deviate from a standard baseline, ranked by what they expose you to rather than by where they appear.
Then ScopeGuard does the same job on the way out: every subcontractor proposal against your own tender documents, so the scope nobody carried is found while you can still argue about it rather than when the invoice arrives.
“We caught two non-standard indemnity clauses on a school board package the day after the tender dropped. We would have spotted them eventually, but probably not before bid close.”
VP preconstructionICI builder · Southern Ontario · $40–80M institutional work · name withheld at the customer’s request
Questions ICI builders ask.
Which plan opens SpecChecker?
Crew and up. Crew is $299 a month for up to three people and also opens Blueprint Auditor, the AI Estimator and ScopeGuard; Pro ($499) and Firm ($1,199) open all eight programs.
Is there a free trial on Crew or Pro?
No. The free trials are on Solo (seven days) and Field (fourteen), and neither opens SpecChecker. To see it on your own manual first, ask and we will run it with you on a call.
Which codes does the audit check against?
Eight code packs ship today, across Canada, the United States and England, all at baseline depth: model-code requirements checked, local amendments not yet applied. The table above lists each with its rule count.
Can our IT team review the security first?
Yes. The security pack has a one-page overview and a data-flow diagram, and we can send a draft NDA before anything is uploaded.
Start with one institutional package.
A real institutional package, with its manual and its addenda. Crew opens SpecChecker and ScopeGuard at $299 a month; Pro opens all eight at $499. Neither has a free trial, so if you would rather see the spec check on your own manual first, ask and we will run it with you on a call.
Different kind of work? These are the others: