Ask a project business whether a particular job made money and you will usually get an answer. It arrives after finance has pulled purchases, labour and invoices from different places and reconciled them. That takes days, and the job has usually closed.
The delay is not a reporting problem. It comes from where each cost is first written down.
Four costs, four places
On a typical job:
- Materials are bought through purchase orders in one tool and drawn from stock tracked in another.
- Labour sits in payroll or timesheets, rarely tagged to the job.
- Subcontractors and equipment are paid by invoice, coded later.
- Revenue is billed from the contract, in a finance system with no idea what the work cost.
Each is correct in its own system. None of them can answer the question, because the answer needs all four against the same job.
What changes with connected records
When these share one project record, margin stops being a report and becomes a running figure:
| On the project | Comes from |
|---|---|
| Contract value | The accepted quotation and signed contract |
| Committed cost | Approved purchase orders |
| Actual materials | Stock issued to the project |
| Other costs | Site expenses and supplier bills against the job |
| Invoiced and collected | Invoices and payments raised from the contract |
Because material is posted to the job when it leaves the warehouse, the actual column moves the same day. Because commitments sit beside actuals, you see what is already spent in effect before the invoice arrives.
Progress next to money
A job that is 60 percent through its budget and 40 percent complete is in trouble. One that is 40 and 40 is fine. Both can look identical if cost and progress are in different places.
In Projects, percentage complete is recorded on the same record as budget by category (materials, labour, logistics, equipment, subcontract). A job running ahead on materials shows it in week six, while the order for the next delivery can still be changed.
What it won't do for you
Two limits are worth knowing. Labour hours entered in Manpower timesheets are not yet charged to a project as cost, so labour on a project is recorded as expenses. And subcontractor retention and payment certificates are not modelled.
Neither is a reason to avoid connected costing. They are the first things to ask any vendor about, because they decide how complete the margin figure is for your kind of job.
The test
Open one active job and ask: what has it cost to date, and how much of that is stock we issued, orders we committed to and bills we received? If the answer is a single screen, the data is connected. If it is a request to finance, it is not.