Taking comment resolution sheets off the spreadsheet
Engineering reviews still run on an Excel CRS and a long email thread. Contrat puts documents, comments, revisions and approvals in one workspace.
On architecture, engineering and construction projects, every technical document goes through review. A client, a consultant or a regulator reads it, raises comments, and the author responds and issues a revision. That goes on until the document is approved. The record of all this is the comment resolution sheet, or CRS.
In practice the CRS is usually an Excel file sent around by email. Comments get copied in by hand from marked-up PDFs, responses are written in a different column by a different person, and by the third revision nobody is sure which spreadsheet is current. The process is sound, but the tools make it fragile.
The same process, in one workspace
Contrat doesn’t change how reviews work. It gives the existing process a single home:
- Upload the technical document as a PDF to secure cloud storage.
- Assign reviewer roles and start the review.
- Reviewers annotate in the document itself, with threaded replies attached to the exact place they refer to.
- The author marks comments as addressed and issues a revision.
- Every comment, response, revision and status appears in the CRS table, and exports to PDF or XLS.
The CRS stops being something someone assembles. It becomes a view of the review as it happens. Architects, engineers and contractors can work on the same document at the same time without version mix-ups, and the approval trail builds itself.
Who it’s for
Contrat is built for the teams that live in document review: infrastructure, transportation, energy, water and utilities, mining and industrial facilities. That means engineers, contractors, clients and regulators on the same review.
The XLS export is deliberate. Many clients still expect a CRS spreadsheet at the end, and a tool that can’t produce one wouldn’t get adopted. The difference is that the spreadsheet is now an output, not the working copy.
Collaborators join free. Paid plans start with Lite at €21.90 a month, and there is a 30-day free trial with no credit card required at contrat.io.