Running a Hawaii Design-Build Practice on a Tenant of Our Own SaaS

Most construction project management software is built for general contractors at scale — multi-region GCs running hundreds of jobs concurrently. The category leaders (Procore, Buildertrend, CoConstruct) charge per user, hide everything behind enterprise gates, and don't know what to do with a Hawaii §237-13(3)(B) sub deduction.

For a Honolulu design-build practice doing high-end residential renovation, the fit was wrong on every axis: too expensive for a small crew, too generic for the regulatory layer, and too closed for the AI-augmented workflows that small operators actually run on day-to-day.

We built BlueWave Projects to solve our own problem first, then opened it up. Ikena is Tenant 1.

9 ops tools wired together end to end Invoices, subs ledger with tax accounting, time clock (iOS + web), daily logs, client document center, finish-selection sign-offs, change orders with public approve links, blueprint editor, and a 3D editor — all in one tenant with row-level isolation.

AI scope generator on every job Drop a RoomPlan scan + a couple of photos, get a phase-by-phase scope of work with line-item ranges and a tax gross-up in 60 seconds. The output becomes the basis of the client quote and seeds the change-order ledger.

Client share by link, not by login Every project has a public timeline + selection + change-order link the client can open from email. No accounts, no app downloads — they see the same project room the crew sees, just read-only.

Hawaii tax accounting baked in Sub-deduction tracking is set up automatically. The system computes the gross-up on the quote, files the deduction at invoice time, and keeps a running ledger so the books match the state filing.

Ikena is the proof that the system runs a real construction business, not a demo. The active $139,165 Puuikena Drive renovation lives entirely inside the BlueWave portal — scope, blueprints, daily logs, change orders, client portal docs — without exporting to spreadsheets or a separate accounting tool.

Over $1M of construction work has flowed through the system since launch. Every feature we ship on BlueWave Projects gets dogfooded on a real job site before it goes out to other tenants.