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In brief: A major construction project today rests on hundreds of subcontractors, but for the first time two players who can't be bypassed — the general contractor and the bank — are demanding transparency. Data collection, tender eligibility and financing all stall from the same root: the data is scattered, unmanageable manually, and not auditable. This article explains why another round of questionnaires isn't enough, and how building subcontractor data collection into the procurement process can take roughly 90% of the manual work off the team.
A major construction project today rests on hundreds of subcontractors, each with its own circle of suppliers behind it. This setup worked for decades: everyone did their own job, the paperwork sat in emails and folders, and as long as the work moved forward, few people asked what was happening two or three tiers down. That's no longer enough. Not because the chain has grown more complex, but because two players who can't be bypassed are now demanding transparency for the first time: the large general contractor and the bank.
Construction is one of the least digitized sectors, which is exactly why this change catches so many companies unprepared. According to the Hungarian Central Statistical Office's report on the digital economy, construction performs worst of all sectors: more than half of companies have very low digital intensity. A GKI survey of 500 companies paints a similar picture: roughly half of Hungarian construction firms are almost entirely digitally inactive. Anyone who has so far avoided having visibility into their own subcontractor chain now faces the fact that transparency is no longer an internal convenience — it's a condition for getting into big projects.
The opacity of the subcontractor chain causes tangible damage at three points, and all three stem from the same root: the data is scattered, unmanageable manually, and not auditable.
The first is plain data collection. A large contractor should be gathering sustainability, performance and compliance data from hundreds of subcontractors — and in auditable form at that. Pulling this together manually from five hundred partners is a volume of administration no single team can handle alongside daily projects. So the data ends up either incomplete or never assembled in time.
The second is tender eligibility. The parent companies of large general contractors already require structured data reporting from their suppliers, and in the next tender round this will be the entry ticket. Regulation stands behind it: the EU's CSDDD directive mandates due diligence across the entire chain of activities for large companies, and the obligation cascades through them down to the smaller subcontractors, from whom their customers request the data. Anyone who can't provide orderly, verifiable data about themselves and their own chain is gradually squeezed out of the subcontractor pool for big projects, regardless of how well they work on site.
The third is financing. Banks increasingly expect Taxonomy compliance for project financing, and the data required for it comes from the construction chain — often unverified. If the credibility of the data chain isn't guaranteed, or the ESG score is incomplete, the bank's interest-rate premium weighs directly on the project's bottom line.
The obvious reaction is to just request the data: send out a questionnaire to every subcontractor and consolidate whatever comes back. In practice, this is where the process usually stalls. Some partners don't reply, others reply incompletely, and still others reply in a format that has to be standardized manually. By the time it all comes together, the tender deadline or the bank's data request has long since passed.
The problem isn't with the one-off collection, but with having to dig out the same data again and again: for a tender, for a bank report, for an audit, for a client questionnaire. On top of that, many certificates have expiry dates that are rarely tracked alongside the data, so it's easy to walk into the next tender with a long-invalid document. If you handle this by email and in separate spreadsheets, starting over with every request, you're essentially pestering the same partners for the same data every round — and you still can't even be sure that what you dig up is actually valid.
The approach that works isn't a separate ESG project running alongside the main process, but having the data created and captured where procurement is already happening. This is the logic Fluenta One applies: it builds subcontractor data collection into the steps of the procurement process. The sustainability criterion attaches to the request for quotation, data validation to supplier qualification, the CSRD clause to contract signing, the audit trail to performance verification. The data thus doesn't come together at the end of the project in a panicked scramble; it forms on its own, along the way.
In practice, this takes roughly 90% of the manual administration off the team's shoulders, because most of the process — from reminders through validation to report generation — is automatic. Missing data doesn't get lost in the system either: it's continuously visible which subcontractor is missing what, and the system sends the reminder on its own, before the gap becomes a problem ahead of a tender or a payment. So the buyer doesn't have to keep in their head who needs chasing, and it isn't the day before the deadline that someone's shortfall comes to light.
The software doesn't just store incoming documents. It reads the content out of scanned, old or mixed-format certificates and data sheets and turns it into structured, searchable data, so the subcontractor doesn't have to squeeze what they send into a rigid template either. The system also cross-checks the data against external sources — for example the tax authority (NAV) and the company register — so the data isn't just present, it's verified.
The transparency of the chain matters not only with existing partners, but also when a new one has to be brought in. In a surging market, where several projects compete at once for the same few reliable subcontractors, the buyer usually picks from those they already know. The rest of the market stays invisible, and a good partner is snapped up by another company because they never even made it onto the list of names worth considering.
This is where Fluenta One's supplier-search agent helps. It searches both the company's own database and external sources, then within minutes produces a ranked list of potential partners — already with verified company data and a base risk score that also looks at financial stability and legal status. And whatever format incoming bids arrive in, it organizes them into a uniform structure and compares them on a total-cost-of-acquisition basis. Finding and evaluating a supplier is thus an order of magnitude faster than the manual round.
There's an important practical benefit on top of this: the data only has to be entered once. Once a subcontractor is in the system, their data stays accessible throughout — from pre-qualification through contract signing to ongoing cooperation — already filled in for the next tender. The partner only updates what's changed rather than filling in the same thing for the tenth time.
None of this takes the decision out of the manager's hands. The system handles the routine; exceptions and approvals always go to the responsible manager. Format and completeness checks and cross-referencing against external data are done by the software, but responsibility for the substance of the submitted data stays with the subcontractor, and the system records who certified what and when. Every data point comes with a source, methodology and timestamp that an auditor can independently trace end to end. The software fits alongside existing ERP, BIM and financial systems rather than replacing them, and it feeds the BIM model data rather than substituting for it.
The next big tender or bank data request won't ask whether the company does good work on site. It will ask you to prove it: that you have visibility into your own subcontractor chain, and that the data behind it is orderly, verified and auditable. Whoever solves this once, built into procurement, finds the next request is a few clicks; whoever has it scattered faces weeks of gathering.
In a short demo we'll look at where your company stands now and what the next step could be.
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