Building public trust into every project record

The Challenge

The Hawai‘i School Facilities Authority (HISFA) builds tuition-free preschools with public bond money, drawing constant scrutiny from legislators and taxpayers. To keep their confidence – and ensure the future of a crucial Pre-K expansion – HSFA must maintain full transparency while avoiding the administrative bottlenecks and audit delays that all-too-frequently slow public projects.

The Solution

With Procore as Hawaii SFA’s digital backbone, budget data populates a public dashboard and a district-level map, helping taxpayers and lawmakers track progress in real time. HISFA runs every contract, change order, invoice and daily log through Procore, which helps speed up critical processes and keeping work on track. Digital signature routing allows for easy approvals while records stay audit-ready at all times.

The Results

• Built transparency and accountability into public project delivery
• Cut invoice and change-order routing from weeks of follow-up to a single action
• Gave lawmakers district-level project visibility through an interactive map
• Made records audit-ready on demand, replacing months of potential prep
• Published live budget and commitment data across 140+ projects for public view

Keeping the contractors moving 

Doug Cullison came to the Hawai‘i School Facilities Authority (HISFA) after years managing large public infrastructure projects. As a project manager at HISFA, a core part of his job is to expand the state's tuition-free preschool capacity, part of a push toward building 8,000 new seats by 2030. 

The work is highly fulfilling — and highly regulated. Hawai'i SFA is funded by a form of public financing known as general obligation (GO) bonds, which means constant legislative oversight and a public accounting for every dollar. For Cullison, keeping the public trust means avoiding delays and waste. “My number one goal is to always keep the contractor moving, no matter what,” he says. “I don't want to be the reason they can't do work.”

When Cullison arrived, the agency was already using Procore through the Department of Education. But as they took on more projects, the arrangement became unsustainable. Luckily, HISFA was able to acquire its own Procore instance through NASPO, a pre-approved purchasing agreement built for government agencies, avoiding a months-long RFP process. 

“I really liked Procore’s fixed-price approach,” Cullison says. “There’s no pressure to spend a lot of money customizing everything, so we always knew the total cost. They set a drop-dead go-live date from day one and always exceeded my expectations.”

Owning its own Procore instance meant Hawai'i SFA could run projects on a single system built for exactly this kind of public accountability, a single source of truth that contains contracts, change orders, invoices and daily logs. For an agency answering to auditors and lawmakers, that single record created an indispensable foundation for transparency.  

Moving money in a click

To meet his goal of never slowing down the contractors, Cullison focuses on getting them paid on time and with minimum hassle. HISFA uses Procore to rapidly process invoices, change orders and contracts, with digital signature routing built in. What used to require multiple hard copies and follow-ups now occurs in a single step. 

“I can just hit one button and route the invoices to everyone,” Cullison says. “That probably cuts the time by weeks.” The faster routing helps protect cash flow and keep work moving forward. It also means the approval and the record are one and the same, so there's nothing to reconstruct later if someone inquires about a decision. 

Ready for an audit, any day 

Because the record is complete, it's also always ready. Without a platform like Procore, audits would mean months of pulling files and scanning paper. Now, day-to-day project management generates the documentation automatically, helping keep records up-to-date and easy to share. “Because everything lives in Procore, we can produce records for an audit without waiting months to scan copies,” Cullison says. 

Cullison watches the whole portfolio from one screen – more than 140 projects, with incoming submittals, open RFIs and punch-list progress all in one view. He can tell a project's health at a glance; a submittal that lands without its attachments, for example, is a red flag. 

And Cullison isn’t the only one watching: The public can view the same live project data. “We are completely transparent,” Cullison says. “Taxpayers can use our dashboards to see the status of every project, and that builds trust.”

Letting taxpayers see for themselves 

That public view takes two forms. On the agency's website, a dashboard pulls live budget and committed amounts from Procore onto a map, so anyone can click a project and compare what was allocated against what’s been spent. The second interface is built for lawmakers: an interactive district map where a representative can select their own name and immediately see the projects happening in their district.

For legislators who fund capital work but rarely see it up close, that transparency helps ease skepticism about whether the work is getting done. The projects are visible, locatable and current, and don’t require filing a request or waiting for a report. 

Procore’s model allows for greater transparency within the project as well. Because Procore pricing isn't tied to the number of users, Cullison can bring every stakeholder into the system without rationing seats. “Procore's pricing model allows us to invite as many stakeholders as needed without worrying about license limits,” he says. “Stakeholders can review all drawings in the system and perform markups directly on the PDF, with all comments synced in real-time.” On more than one project, that shared review has helped HISFA catch design problems before a contract was ever awarded.

For Cullison, that approach suits his vision of the work. “I'm really happy with Procore,” he says. “Their ‘build together' motto gets at something real — construction is about people, and the system helps us work better with our partners.”