Frequently asked questions

Answer a chat. Eva, Paladio’s Concierge, messages him on WhatsApp at the end of the day and asks what the daily control sheet requires: activities per line item, crew, machinery, weather, quality. He replies with text, voice notes or photos — nothing to install, nothing to learn.

Voice is transcribed and the transcript stays inside the folio: every recorded quantity has its word-for-word backing.

The folio replicates the daily control sheet of the bound book: sequential gapless numbering, the paper’s boxes, attached evidence and both signatures — resident and inspector — each with their license number. A day with no activity is recorded too, so the book has no gaps to explain later.

The inspector signs with a one-time code sent to their WhatsApp: licensed identity, timestamp, and a folio that becomes read-only.

Eva, Paladio’s Concierge, compares every quantity against the budget and historical production rates and flags outliers — “masonry logged 45 m² today against a usual pace of 28” — so the inspector looks before signing. The decision is always the inspector’s; Eva only says where to look.

From the folios and each line item’s unit price analysis. When a diary is recorded, progress against plan, cost composition and material consumption recompute themselves. No chart is ever typed in — if a number is on screen, there is a signed folio behind it.

Yes. What Paladio seals is not a particular acronym: it is the identity of whoever answers for what was signed — their name, their registration number and the exact moment they signed. The number stored in the record is the one that licenses that professional in their own country.

In Colombia it is the COPNIA professional licence; in Peru, CIP membership; in Mexico, the cédula profesional, and on site the signature of the Director Responsable de Obra; in Brazil, the CREA registration with its Technical Responsibility Note (ART); in Venezuela, the C.I.V. In Chile, where membership stopped being mandatory in 1981, the record names the competent professional the project designates.

The daily record does not change shape when it crosses a border: what changes is the label of the registration that sits under the name. Everything else — the unbroken numbering, the fields of the official form, the one-time code, the timestamp and the content hash — is the same everywhere.

Yes. All of Latin America has had e-signature legal frameworks for over two decades: Law 527 of 1999 in Colombia, Law 27269 in Peru, Law 19.799 in Chile, the Advanced Electronic Signature Law in Mexico and the Data Messages and Electronic Signatures Law in Venezuela, among others. Under all of them, electronic signatures carry evidentiary force comparable to handwritten ones.

Every approval or objection in Paladio is signed with the official’s verified identity, a timestamp and a cryptographic fingerprint of the approved content: which line items, which quantities, which amounts and which evidence was attached at that moment.

Yes. Paladio generates a printable certificate for each estimate, with a verification code binding it to the digital file. Paper becomes a copy of the system, not the other way around: whoever receives the printed certificate can check it against the file.

In practice many authorities start this way — signing digitally and backing it with paper — and drop the paper once the rules are updated.

The signature stays tied to the person and the role they held at that moment, with its timestamp. A change of officeholder neither invalidates nor rewrites what was signed: the file keeps who approved each estimate and under what responsibility.

To the authority. Always. Drawings, budgets, estimates, evidence and logs belong to the contracting authority; Paladio is the technical custodian, not the owner.

Everything is exportable in open formats (PDF for certificates and reports, structured data for the authority’s own systems). If the authority decides to leave, it takes its complete file — no hostages.

Encryption in transit and at rest, role-based access control (analysts don’t approve, inspectors don’t edit budgets, comptrollers only read) and strengthened authentication for signing roles.

Automatic backups with authority-defined retention, and a record of every access to the file: you also know who looked, not just who signed.

Security is a design commitment from day one — not a sticker added at the end. Deployment details (cloud or the authority’s own infrastructure) are defined with each institution.

No. Each authority operates in an isolated space: its data never crosses with other institutions’ nor is used for anything beyond its own operation.

Corruption in construction feeds on opacity and discretion. Paladio attacks both by design: segregation of duties (whoever uploads doesn’t approve; whoever approves is on record), amounts tied to verifiable physical elements and mandatory evidence anchored to every line item.

The log is immutable: approvals, objections, comments and changes are written with author, date and content — no silent edits, no files reconstructed for convenience.

Financial control stops being reactive: overrun alerts before approval, double billing visible on the model and actual-vs-planned deviations that expose the problem while it can still be fixed.

Yes. The comptroller, control body or funder gets read-only access to the living file: every estimate, every approval and every piece of evidence, the moment it happens. No boxes to request, no waiting for the fiscal year to close.

That access is strictly read-only: auditors can view, filter and export, but cannot modify the file or alter the log.

From the portfolio to the rebar: from the authority’s total released amount, to the project, to the estimate, to the line item, to the element in the 3D model, down to its material sheet with standard and quality control. Any portfolio figure can be opened to the element that backs it.

For the logbook: the itemized budget, the unit price analyses if you have them —they can be uploaded later, per chapter— and the site engineer’s WhatsApp. With that the project starts recording the same day.

DWG drawings or BIM models add the visual layer: the pipeline turns CAD layers into 3D elements grouped by trade. Welcome, but not a requirement to start.

Yes. The contractor submits the estimate with quantities, photo evidence and supporting documents per line item; the inspector reviews it on the model and both discuss inside the same file. Fewer back-and-forths and shorter payment cycles.

The AI cross-checks the 3D model, the budget, the estimate history and the photo evidence, and produces a pre-analysis: items at overrun risk, incomplete evidence and atypical quantities.

The decision is always human. The AI points to where to look; the inspector approves, objects and signs.

The site logbook is the heart of the product and it is real today: folios over WhatsApp, licensed signatures, the budget with its unit price analyses and metrics that compute themselves. The 3D digital twin and AI-assisted estimate reading are where the platform is headed, shown as what they are: the roadmap. Figures on this site are demonstration data.