WHAT HAPPENS IN THE FIELD IS YOUR FINANCIAL SYSTEM.
Job costing tells you what you spent. Production tracking tells you what you got for it. A crew pouring 220 yards on Tuesday spent $4,200 in labor, and the question that counts is whether the estimate assumed 220 yards in that time or 280. Without unit counts measured against your estimated production rates, you've cost visibility and no efficiency reading at all. Production tracking ties field output to financial performance the same week, before variances compound into a job loss.
The reason this belongs in a finance conversation and not just an operations one is that the field is where margin gets made or lost, while the office is where it gets discovered long after the fact. A daily unit count moves the discovery from job close to this week. Nothing else in job costing comes close, because every other report sits downstream of money already spent. This is the only measurement that tells you a job is in trouble while there's still enough job left to do something about it, and the entry takes a foreman five minutes at the end of the day.
WHAT IT MEANS.
Production tracking is recording field output, meaning cubic yards moved, linear feet installed, square feet framed, and tons placed, by day, by crew, and by phase.
Cost per unit tells you more than cost per hour. A crew that moved 180 yards instead of the estimated 280 is losing margin today, and no cost report will say so, because a cost report is satisfied as long as the hours track the budget. The unit count is the only place that variance is visible while the job is still running.
WHAT COST DATA ALONE CANNOT TELL YOU.
Cost per hour can't tell you whether you're winning
Forty hours of framing labor tells you what you spent. Forty hours that produced 4,200 square feet against an estimated rate of 120 SF per hour tells you the crew ran at 87% efficiency. The first number is a fact you can do nothing with. The second is a decision about crew size, sequence, or scope, and only one of the two appears on a standard job cost report.
Production rate variance is the earliest margin warning you get
When production drops below estimate, say 85 cubic yards per hour against 110 estimated, there's still time to change something mid-project. Caught at job close, the same information is a post mortem. Every week you run without unit counts is a week where margin can slip and nobody has the data to argue about it.
Cost to complete doesn't work without production data
Cost to complete calculations rest on production assumptions, and most of them just reuse the rates from the original bid. If you've 3,000 linear feet of pipe left and the crew is running 60 feet per hour against an estimated 80, the forecast has to use 60. Using 80 produces a cost to complete that's wrong by a wide margin and a WIP schedule built on top of that error.
WHAT GETS BUILT, AND BY WHOM.
Crews log production by phase and by unit every day, and it's a five minute entry at the end of the day. That data feeds the weekly cost per unit calculation without anybody writing a separate PM report. The foreman records what he built rather than what he spent, which is the part he already knows without looking anything up.
Every week produces one summary: total units against estimate, labor hours per unit against estimate, and cost per unit variance. Any variance over 10% triggers a review of crew composition, equipment, site conditions, or scope. That review happens while the job is still running, which is the only point at which it can change the outcome.
Cost to complete gets recalculated monthly using the actual rates from the prior 30 days instead of the original estimate. If month one ran at 85 yards per hour, month two's forecast uses 85 rather than the 110 in the bid. That one rule is the whole difference between a forecast and a wish.
Excavation counts cubic yards, framing and drywall count square feet, utilities count linear feet, and paving counts tons. Each trade's unit has to match the unit the estimate was built in, or the comparison tells you nothing. Getting that alignment right at setup is most of the work of installing production tracking.
FLAT MONTHLY FEE. NO SURPRISES.
Three tiers, priced by your trailing twelve month revenue. Which one you're in depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. No hourly billing, no payroll, and no add-ons.
Pricing
| Last 12 months revenue | Monthly fee |
|---|---|
| Up to $1M | $1,900 to $2,900 |
| $1M to $3.5M | $2,600 to $3,900 |
| $3.5M to $6.5M | $3,800 to $5,700 |
| $6.5M to $9.5M | $5,100 to $7,100 |
| $9.5M to $12.5M | $6,100 to $8,500 |
| $12.5M to $15.5M | $7,400 to $11,000 |
| $15.5M to $18.5M | $9,400 to $13,500 |
| $18.5M+ | Quoted individually |
Range reflects the three tiers below. Which one you're in depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. No payroll. No hidden line items.
You stop guessing.
You get the CFO work. Job costing built against the way you estimate, a 13 week cash forecast, monthly WIP, and a meeting every month that ends in decisions rather than a report.
Your bookkeeper keeps doing the books.
You stop touching the books.
Everything in Core, and we run the bookkeeping and the controllership as well. Nobody in your office is answering coding questions or chasing a reconciliation at month end.
We do the books. No payroll.
Every job shows its margin while it's still running.
Everything in Executive, plus the job costing and WIP platform set up, loaded with your cost codes, and managed for you every month. You never have to learn it.
We do the job costing.
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