Construction and trades
Costs land across payroll, suppliers and subcontractors on different cycles. Job profitability is usually only knowable in hindsight.
Job-level cost visibility
Reads accounting and field systems
Works with subcontractor billing
Runs in your own cloud
Where the money leaks
Each one is a measure that exists somewhere in your systems and cannot be trusted today.
Committed cost is real long before it is booked. Without it in the same model as actual cost, an in-flight job reads better than it is, and the correction arrives too late to act on.
Unbilled time and retention balances build up out of sight. They are the least visible part of your working capital and often the biggest.
The material that explains a variation is usually a photo and a note, not a system record. Until it is searchable alongside the cost data, the explanation and the number never meet.
What you will be able to see
Three or four of these are where the money actually moves. All of them are in your systems already.
Committed and actual cost against contract value, while the job is live.
What has been done and not yet billed.
Including the balances held back and often forgotten.
By job and by trade, against budget.
Raised, approved and billed, with the gaps visible.
What is due in against what is due out.
The job is profitable until the last invoices arrive.
Cost lands late and from several directions, so the live picture is always optimistic. Bringing committed cost into the same model as actual cost is what makes an in-flight job readable.
That material can go into the unstructured pipeline and become searchable. Whether it can be turned into structured cost data depends on how consistent it is, and week one records that honestly.
No, and it should not. We read it and model alongside it. Replacing a system of record is a different and much larger project.
Other sectors
Half an hour works out which measures are worth baselining and whether your systems can be read.
