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Cost control

Know a job is losing money
while you can still fix it.

Most contractors find out how a job really went at the final account, six weeks after the last operative left site. Unibuild builds the cost position from the hours punched, the orders approved and the receipts photographed, so the number is there on Tuesday morning while there is still contract left to act on.

Bring a job you know the answer to → The revenue side
cost accrues as it happens orders counted at commitment labour at dated cost rates every total opens up
Why the number arrives late

The true cost of a job is
discovered six weeks after
the last operative left site.

By then the only decision available is whether to bid the next one differently, which is not management information. It is a history lesson.

Labour
Known only after payroll runs, and then filed by employee rather than by job.
Weeks behind
Materials
Bought on account with a job name given verbally. The office finds out when the statement arrives.
A month behind
Variations
Done on a nod. The paperwork never follows, so the cost lands but the revenue does not.
Silent loss
Hired plant
Hired for four weeks. The job ran two weeks over. Nobody sent it back.
Still invoicing
Every month
The commercial manager rebuilds the same spreadsheet from payroll, the purchase ledger and the subbie file.
≈ 2 days
The question
Which of our current jobs is in trouble? Answering it means doing all of the above, for every job.
Never asked
The mechanism Cost accrues from operational events, not accounting events Which is weeks of warning
What is in the module

Six things, and the whole
argument rests on the first.

Cost as
it happens

01

Labour costs the job the day it is worked, not the week payroll runs. Materials cost the job when the order is approved, not when the statement lands.

  • An operative punches in against a project
  • The hours land with the project reference on them
  • The cost of Monday is visible on Tuesday
  • Both happen weeks before the money moves
Early warning, not a post mortemLive

Committed,
not just spent

02

Approved purchase orders count against the job at commitment rather than at invoice. A four week hire ordered this morning is exposure this morning.

  • Contractors habitually under report their own position
  • Because they can only see what has been invoiced
  • The gap between ordered and invoiced is where jobs get away
  • Supplier credits netted off automatically
See the limit on subcontract belowLive

Real hourly
rates

03

Each person carries a cost rate with an effective from date, and hours are priced at the rate that applied on the day they were worked.

  • January's work stays priced at January's rate
  • Whatever happened at the April review
  • 86 dated rate records across 63 people in live use
  • No blended company average standing in for the truth
Historic margins stop movingLive

Every figure
opens up

04

Click any project and see the timesheet lines, the reimbursement receipts, the subcontractor invoices and the purchase orders behind the total, each linking to its own document.

  • A disputed labour cost opens onto the timesheet lines
  • A supplier statement that disagrees opens onto the orders
  • Numbers that can be interrogated get believed
  • Numbers out of a spreadsheet get argued about
Showing the workingLive

One contract
value

05

Project value is the sum of the client purchase orders on file rather than a number somebody typed into a form.

  • The project page, the applications and the cost report agree
  • Because all three run the same calculation
  • Add a client order and every screen moves together
  • No field for one person to update and another to miss
One figure, with paperwork behind itLive

Plant that outstayed
the job

06

A single page lists projects past their recorded end date that are still open, with the plant categories still allocated to each one.

  • Hire running past practical completion
  • Is the cheapest loss there is to stop
  • A page that takes ten seconds to read
  • Rather than a discovery on an invoice
Ten seconds, real moneyLive
The most useful section on this page

What is in the cost figure,
and what is not.

A cost report whose contents you cannot list is a report you should not act on. Here is exactly what makes up the number.

Counted

Labour from timesheets, at each person's dated cost ratePurchase orders raised against the project, at approved valueMaterials, hire, waste, fuel and the other order typesSupplier credit notes, netted offSubcontractor invoicesApproved and paid reimbursements

Not counted today

Subcontract order value that has not yet been invoicedMaterial issued from your own storesYour own plant, as an internal chargeAny overhead recoveryDay works and call-out costs

The other side

Contract value, derived from client purchase ordersShown alongside cost, on the same rowNot a profit calculation, see below
The subcontract gap, stated plainly

Committed cost works for materials, hire and everything else bought on a purchase order. It does not yet work for subcontract, where only invoiced value counts and the subcontract order value is invisible to the report. For a main contractor with a large subcontract ledger that is a material difference, and it is worth understanding before you rely on the figure. The order values exist, they are approved, and they sit against the same project, so bringing them in is a defined piece of work rather than a redesign.

Commercial manager reviewing figures
6,643Timesheet lines across 77 projects
879Purchase orders feeding job cost
114Client orders driving contract value

Counted in the construction deployment, July 2026. The cost side is multi year and continuous. The revenue side is lightly used, and that is set out below.

The word we do not use

This is a cost report with
a contract value alongside it.
It is not a profit calculation.

Naming this page cost control rather than profitability is a deliberate decision, and it is worth explaining why rather than leaving you to notice.

What you get
A live cost position, which is the useful half of the question and the half most firms cannot answer at all until the final account. Labour flows in automatically at real dated rates, purchase orders at committed value, and staff expenses as they are approved, all attached to the job, with the contract value derived from your client's own orders sitting next to it.
What you do not get
A complete profit and return calculation. Supplier invoice values do not reach costing in one of the two deployments, stores issues carry no value, and there is no overhead recovery. We would rather describe it that way than show you a report with a column that does not compute.
Where one deployment goes further
The site services system closes the loop back to the tender: a discrepancy view compares estimated hours against hours logged and estimated quantities against quantities used, section by section, and a programme view plots planned contract value against actual billed value week by week. That is genuinely stronger than anything the construction deployment computes, and it is what a full estimate against actual comparison looks like when the price library is populated.
Why we lead with the limitation
Because a commercial manager opens the report, looks for the profit column, and forms a permanent view of the supplier in that moment. Telling you first costs us nothing and buys the rest of the page some credibility. It is also the single clearest example on this website of what the tailored half of the engagement would actually build.
The defensible sentence The cost side is real, in daily use and multi year. The revenue side is built but lightly used Joining them properly is the first job
What it does not do

Four more, beyond the
section above.

01
No manual cost entry
Cost reaches a job by being an operational event: an hour worked, an order approved, a receipt claimed. There is no screen for typing a cost onto a project directly, and we are not going to describe one that does not exist. If you need to book an accrual or an internal charge, that is a defined addition.
02
No cost threshold alerting
Nothing emails you when cost passes a percentage of contract value. The figures are computed live every time the page is opened, and somebody has to open it. The reminders engine elsewhere in the platform does send scheduled alerts, so joining the two is straightforward and it is the first thing most prospects ask for.
03
No estimate against actual in every deployment
The section by section comparison between what you estimated and what site actually used depends on the job having been priced through a structured estimate. Where quotations are priced by typing a rate, there is nothing to compare against. Both are legitimate ways to run a business and only one of them supports the comparison.
04
Rates are the thing you must load
Without a cost rate for a person, their hours contribute nothing to the labour figure and the report quietly understates. Loading a rate per person with an effective from date is a short task at implementation and it is the single highest value hour anybody spends on setup. We would rather flag it than have you draw conclusions from an incomplete number in month one.

The cost inputs above are multi year and continuous across two live businesses. These four are the honest edges.

Questions

Asked by directors and
commercial managers.

Can it tell me if a job is profitable?+
It gives you a live cost position, which is the useful half of that question and the half most firms cannot answer at all until the final account. Labour flows in automatically at real effective dated rates, purchase orders at committed value, and staff expenses as they are approved, all attached to the job. One of the two deployments goes further and closes the loop back to the tender, comparing estimated hours against hours logged and estimated quantities against quantities used, section by section. What neither does today is a complete profit and return calculation, and we would rather say that than show you a report with a column that does not compute.
How current is the figure?+
It is computed when you open the page, from the same tables the rest of the system writes to. There is no overnight job and no snapshot. If an operative punched out an hour ago and a purchase order was approved this morning, both are in the number. That currency is the single strongest and most defensible claim this module makes.
What exactly is included in the cost?+
Included: labour from timesheets priced at each person's cost rate, purchase orders raised against the project across materials, hire, waste, fuel and the rest, subcontractor invoices, and approved reimbursements. Not included as it stands: subcontract order value that has not yet been invoiced, material issued from your own stores, your own plant, and any overhead recovery. We would rather tell you now than have you find it in month two, and extending it is normal implementation work we would scope with you.
Our hourly rates are confidential. Who can see this?+
Access to the reports area and to individual pages within it is set per user, so the cost report can be limited to the directors and the commercial manager. Operatives never see a cost or a rate anywhere in the mobile app, and clients and subcontractors have no access to it at all. There is also a specific flag governing whether a given person can see hourly rates, separate from their general access.
We have not got cost rates for our people. Is that a problem?+
Yes, and it is the first thing to fix. Without a cost rate for a person, their hours contribute nothing to the labour figure and the report understates. Loading a rate per person with an effective from date is a short task at implementation and it is the single highest value hour anyone spends on setup. Everything else on this page depends on it being done properly.
Our project managers will not raise a client order for every instruction.+
Then the contract value will be wrong, and no software fixes that on its own. What Unibuild does is make the consequence visible: the value sits on the project page next to the cost, and a job where cost is climbing against a value that has not moved is obvious to a director within seconds. In our experience that visibility changes the behaviour faster than a policy does, because it makes the omission somebody else's problem rather than an invisible one.
Does this replace our accounts package?+
No, and we would tell you not to try. Unibuild is the operational system that knows what happened on site. Your accounts package is the financial record. Any deeper connection to your particular accounts system is scoped work rather than something we pretend already exists, and the integrations page sets out exactly which connections are live, which are pilots and which do not exist at all.
Next step

Bring a job you already
know the answer to.

The test See whether the system agrees with you Including the parts still developing
Book a walkthrough → Where the estimate comes from
Phone · UK hours
+44 7587 557546
Email
[email protected]
The revenue side
Applications
Demo calendar
unibuild.co.uk/demo