Cost control

Job costing that catches
a loss while you can
still fix it.

Most contractors find out how a job went at the final account, six weeks late. Unibuild builds the position from hours clocked and orders approved, so the number is there on Tuesday.

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Construction manager reviewing live job costs in Unibuild

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 price 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

Labour costRates with a start dateCommitted order valueSupplier credits nettedApproved reimbursementsSubcontractor invoicesDerived contract valueClient purchase ordersCost against valueLine level breakdownSource documentsJob overrunPlant still allocatedEstimate versus actual Labour costRates with a start dateCommitted order valueSupplier credits nettedApproved reimbursementsSubcontractor invoicesDerived contract valueClient purchase ordersCost against valueLine level breakdownSource documentsJob overrunPlant still allocatedEstimate versus actual

What is in the module

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

Cost as
it happens

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.

Clocked in against a project
Hours land on the job
Monday’s cost seen on Tuesday
Weeks before the money moves

Early warning, not a post mortemLive

Committed,
not just spent

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

Counted at order, not invoice
Where jobs usually get away
Nothing waits for the statement
Supplier credits netted off

Exposure the day it is approvedLive

Real hourly
rates

Each person carries a cost rate with a start date. Hours are priced at the rate that applied on the day they were worked.

January’s work at January’s rate
Whatever the April review did
86 rates across 63 people, in live use
No blended company average

Historic margins stop movingLive

Every figure
opens up

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.

Labour opens onto timesheet lines
Supplier totals open onto orders
Numbers you can check get believed
Spreadsheet numbers get argued about

Showing the workingLive

One contract
value

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

Project, applications and report agree
One calculation behind all three
Add an order, every screen moves
Nothing for one person to miss

One figure, with paperwork behind itLive

Plant that outstayed
the job

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

Hire past practical completion
The cheapest loss to stop
Ten seconds to read
Not found on an invoice

Ten seconds, real moneyLive

What is counted

What is in
the cost figure.

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 cost rate for the dayPurchase orders raised against the project, at approved valueMaterials, hire, waste, fuel and the other order typesSupplier credit notes, netted offSubcontractor invoicesApproved and paid reimbursements

The other side

Contract value, derived from client purchase ordersShown alongside cost, on the same rowMargin worked out live against it

Subcontract, read alongside

Committed cost covers materials, hire and everything else bought on a purchase order. Subcontract carries its own committed position through the order, the variations and the payment schedule. The two are read together, against the same project.

Real-time profitability

The margin on every job, while the job is still running.

Most contractors find out what a job made at the final account, months after anything could be done about it. This is the half of the question that answers itself as the work happens.

What lands on the job by itself: Labour from the timesheet at each person’s rate for the day, purchase orders at committed value, supplier invoices, stores issues and staff expenses as they are approved. All of it attached to the job by the people already doing the work, with the contract value derived from your client's own orders sitting next to it. Nobody assembles this and nobody retypes it.
What it computes: The live cost position and the margin against it, for one job or across the portfolio, current to the hour rather than to the last month end. The commercial team stops waiting for a period to close before it can answer what a job is making.
Estimate against actual: A discrepancy view compares estimated hours against hours logged and estimated quantities against quantities used, section by section. A programme view plots planned contract value against actual billed value week by week, so a job drifting away from its tender shows up while there is still job left to run.
Where every figure comes from: Each number traces back to the record that produced it: the timesheet line, the order, the approved invoice, the valuation. That matters more than the arithmetic. A margin nobody can trace is a margin nobody acts on, which is how firms end up with a report they do not believe and a spreadsheet they run alongside it.

Workers on a construction site, whose hours and costs feed the live margin on the job

Where it stands Multi-year, and in daily use across two businesses Current to the hour

Questions

Asked by directors and
commercial managers.

Can it tell me if a job is profitable?

Yes, while the job is still running rather than at the final account. Labour arrives at each person’s rate for the day. Purchase orders count at committed value, and supplier invoices, stores issues and staff expenses count as they are approved. The contract value, taken from your client’s own orders, sits alongside. The margin is worked out against that, for one job or across the portfolio. Estimated hours and quantities are compared against actual, section by section, so a job drifting from its price shows up while there is still job left to run.

How current is the figure?

It is worked out when you open the page, from the same records the rest of the system uses. Nothing waits for an overnight update. If an operative clocked out an hour ago and a purchase order was approved this morning, both are in the number.

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. Each figure opens onto the record that produced it.

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. A separate setting controls whether a given person can see hourly rates at all.

We have not got cost rates for our people. Is that a problem?

No. Cost rates are the first thing set up. Loading a rate per person, with a start date, is a short task at implementation. From then on every hour lands on the job already costed. It is the most valuable hour anyone spends on setup.

Our project managers will not raise a client order for every instruction.

Then the contract value falls behind, and Unibuild makes that 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. Visibility tends to change that 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. Your accounts package stays as the financial record, and Unibuild runs the job up to it. Unibuild syncs with QuickBooks, Xero and Sage 50, and payroll and any other data export as CSV, XML or JSON. The integrations page sets out every connection.

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