Join | Preconstruction + Design Phase Management

What’s new in Join: 2026

Your whole project, in one live picture.

Cost, schedule, risk, and every open design decision — connected, current, and shared with the right people. Here’s what Join does today and what we’ve released so far this year.

Join the more than 1,000 companies using the industry's leading preconstruction and design phase management software.

1,000+
Companies
10,000+
Projects
$500B+
In project value
50%+
Of the ENR 50
DPR ConstructionSwinertonClark ConstructionMcCarthyBarton MalowBoldtKitchellLevel 10 ConstructionXL ConstructionDPR ConstructionSwinertonClark ConstructionMcCarthyBarton MalowBoldtKitchellLevel 10 ConstructionXL Construction
“In an industry full of software applications, I believe that your platform could be the single biggest contributor to facilitating timely decisions and real-time estimate modeling.”
Aaron Zeligman, Senior Project Executive at Banner Health
Aaron Zeligman
Senior Project Executive, Banner Health
Watch the video
The Join items list showing each open decision with its cost impact, schedule impact, owner, and due date.
One platform, the whole story

From concept to GMP, in one connected place.

Bring your estimate in from the tools you already use. Join connects budget, design milestones, decisions, and risk — so a change in one updates the others automatically, and everyone is looking at the same number on the same day.

  • Cost and schedule trending — the real number today, live with every accepted decision
  • Design decision tracking with cost impact, schedule impact, an owner, and a due date
  • Scenarios that price real design trade-offs side by side, with no duplicate estimates
  • Risk register and contingency management, from open to closed
  • Saved, automated reports — the view in the room is the live view

What's new in 2026

New in Timeline

Bring your master schedule straight in.

Import directly from P6 and Microsoft Project. Your activities and milestones land in Join's design and preconstruction timeline without anyone retyping them — and re-importing updates what's already there instead of duplicating it.

  • Import from the scheduling tool you already run
  • No duplicate entry, no parallel version to maintain
  • Design decision due dates sit against real design milestones, so a slip in April is visible long before it lands in October

"We're using another scheduling software… If there's an automatic import process, that makes it easier."

Customer feedback that drove this release
Join's design and preconstruction timeline in presentation mode, showing design phases, milestones, and a histogram of past due and decided items over time.
Join's risk register showing risk distribution by impact and likelihood, with each risk scored and linked to related items.
New in Risk Register

Risk and decisions, finally connected.

Risks and items now link both ways. Long lead times on electrical gear become a tracked risk with a score, an owner, and a due date — and the design decision that mitigates it is one click away, with its cost and schedule impact attached.

  • Link risks to design decisions and decisions back to risks, in either direction
  • Due dates and open/closed status on every risk, so mitigation actually gets driven
  • Impact and likelihood scoring, with contingency you can show being managed

"If it has a schedule impact, it should affect the timeline." / "I could see us using risk register if we could tie items to a specific due date."

Customer feedback that drove this release
New in Reporting

Build the report you want to show.

The milestone report builder lets you choose your columns, groupings, and cost granularity — estimate, budget, item costs, line detail, due dates, assignees — and save it as a view your team returns to every milestone. Rebuilt this year for the kind of visual hierarchy that makes a table readable in a room.

  • Configure columns, groupings, and cost detail to match how your firm reports
  • Clear visual hierarchy — text weight, row lines, aligned numbers, status icons
  • Save it once; it's current every time you open it
The milestone report builder in Join with its configuration panel open, showing selectable columns for item details, categorizations, line cost details and project totals, the row grouping chips beneath them, and the live report updating alongside.
The new PDF export of a Join milestone report, with a clean header carrying the project team's company logos, the project name and image, aligned cost columns, status icons on every line, and a new footer with date and page count.
Early Access: PDF Export Upgrade

And a PDF you'd put your logo on.

Owners still say "send me the PDF." Now the PDF looks like the platform: a clean header and footer, your project images, page sizes from Letter to Tabloid, and every column fitting neatly on the page.

  • Letter, A3, Tabloid, or custom page size
  • Project and company images in the header
  • Ready to send as-is — no export to Excel and reformat first

"Everybody likes the way it looks whenever it's up and it's live and it's working and it's moving."

Customer feedback that drove this release
In your next pursuit

From RFP to interview, prove your precon approach.

The differentiator isn't which estimating tool you use, it's whether you can show an owner how you'll manage cost, schedule, and design from day one. Teams leverage Join to demonstrate: this is how you'll stay informed, how you'll be involved in decisions, and how your budget and schedule get protected.

See the Pursuit Toolkit
What GCs say
"We pitch Join at every interview. I got one today. I got one on Thursday. I live stream a test project to show them."

Senior Vice President, Operations — ENR 400 general contractor, higher education

Proof

Proven where the stakes are highest.

Complex programs, sophisticated owners, and schedules that don't move. These are the projects Join was built for.

Healthcare

Hitting an aggressive hospital budget without touching the patient experience

"We brought on 78% of the trades at the Conceptual phase, and we had 90% of the job under contract at the end of DDs. With this high level of cost certainty, the Owner got early project funding."

Michael Blasingim — Director of IPD and Design Build, Layton Construction

Layton's team reduced overall construction cost on a Montana hospital by 8% and went to GMP at DD instead of CD.

Read the case study
Higher education

A $340M academic building, delivered on a university's strict budget

"Join helped the design team stay within targeted budgets. This improved the design process immensely. I find Join invaluable."

Jeff Bonk — Project Delivery Manager, Michigan State University

Barton Malow used Join Scenarios to model options with MSU and six colleges' worth of stakeholders without slowing the design.

Read the case study
Life sciences & advanced technology

Pricing lab and process decisions before the design locks in

Lab, cleanroom, and process-utility scope is where these projects gain or lose their budget — and those calls get made early, with incomplete information, across a lot of stakeholders.

Join gives these teams somewhere to price the options side by side, tie each one to the design milestone it has to land by, and keep the owner current without a new spreadsheet.

Explore the platform
Data centers

Speed to market, without losing control of the number

$40B+
DC construction
managed in Join
4,000+ MW
Capacity
planned in Join

Entitlements, power, design, and procurement all advance at once. Join keeps the thread across them so teams can adapt fast and still defend the path to the in-service date.

See Join for data centers
Multifamily & mixed-use

Nearly $8M out of the budget — and a stalled project went ahead

Bancroft Construction walked into a budget meeting with a dozen options already modeled in Join, won the 600,000 SF Steelworks development on the strength of them, then worked with the developer to take nearly $8 million out of the budget — down to the door hardware spec.

Read the case study
"We went into that meeting with a dozen or so solutions that we had built out in Join. That really is what sparked the conversation and ultimately helped us create a newfound excitement for the development."

Bobby Judge — Business Development Manager, Bancroft Construction

Steelworks · Phoenixville, PA · 375 apartments over 45,000 SF of retail · CM-at-Risk for DeMutis Group

Your data, your controls

Built for programs that can't leak.

Confidential owners, NDAs, and cost information that only some people should see. Join gives you precise control over who sees what.

  • Granular, role-based permissions — down to individual cost fields
  • Owner and partner views that show only what you choose to share
  • A complete, time-stamped history of every decision, so the record is always defensible
SOC 2 Type II compliant

Ready to see it in action?

Join the more than 1,000 companies using the industry’s leading preconstruction software to improve project outcomes and level up across the firm.