Most contractors don't have a costing problem. They have a timing problem. The data exists — timecards, supplier invoices, change orders — but it lands in different places at different times, and only meets up in the bookkeeper's QuickBooks file weeks after the work happened.
The root cause: data with no shared backbone
When your estimate lives in one tool, your time in another, your bills in a third, and your books in a fourth, nothing reconciles until someone forces it to. By then the job is finished and the margin is locked in.
If you can't see cost-to-complete while the job is running, you can't protect the margin on it.
The fix: one cost spine
JobGantry organizes everything around a single model — Job → Phase → Cost-Category. Every estimate line, timecard, PO, bill, and invoice posts against it. Because everything shares one backbone, these roll up in real time:
- Budget vs. committed vs. actual at the job, phase, and category level
- Earned revenue and WIP, calculated from % complete
- Projected and current profit that always ties out
Add labor productivity
Cost is half the story. JobGantry's labor productivity report compares budgeted vs. earned vs. burned hours and surfaces a performance factor plus a cost-at-completion projection. A PF below 1.0 on a framing phase tells you to act this week, not at closeout.
Where to start
Pick one active job. Set up its phases and cost categories, import the estimate, and route time and bills to it for two weeks. The first time you watch earned revenue tick up as the crew works, the month-behind era is over.