Field notes
How to know if a job made money before the books close
If you find out a job lost money when the books close, you found out two weeks too late. The decision that would have saved it is gone. Here is how to see it while the job is still open.
By Gil Ramirez
Most contractors run job costing backward. The crew rolls off, the paperwork trickles in, the bookkeeper closes the month, and somewhere in that report is the job that quietly lost money. By the time you see it, the next three jobs just like it are already done.
The fix is not a bigger report at month-end. It is a smaller one you can see every day, while there is still time to act.
Watch four things, live
Cost against billed, on every open job. Not after closeout. As labor hours and material land, they should post to the job so you can see cost against what you will bill. A job trending the wrong way is a phone call today, not a surprise in three weeks.
Crew-level cost. Two crews run the same job type and one of them quietly costs you money every time. You cannot see that in a company-wide margin number. You can see it the moment costing is tracked by crew.
Estimate against actual. Labor and materials tracked against the original estimate, so an overrun shows up while the crew is still on site and a course correction still matters.
Over-budget alerts. You should not have to go looking. The job that crosses its budget should raise its hand on its own.
Why closeout costing is too late
A job that closes over budget is not a data problem. It is a decision you did not get to make. Maybe you would have moved a crew, called the customer about a change order, or stopped buying material against a job that was already underwater. None of that is possible after the fact.
One contractor we worked with could not say whether a month made money until long after it closed. We put the operation on a weekly cycle instead: one dashboard every Monday showing revenue, cost, margin, and cash. Inside seven months net profit grew almost fivefold, on 37 percent more volume, because the owner could finally see the month while there was still time to change it.
You do not need another app for this
You need job costing that fits how your operation already runs, fed by the field data your crews already produce. Sometimes that is a light build on top of what you have. Sometimes it is a system. The point is that the number arrives while it still means something.