The WIP schedule is a monthly ordeal
Percent complete, earned revenue, over- and under-billing, rebuilt in a workbook every month. Your surety and your bank both read it, and one person can produce it.
ERP by industry
General and specialty contractors, at the size where the WIP schedule has become a monthly ordeal and the surety, the bank, and the owner all want numbers the accounting system cannot produce. Five percent net margin means a two-point job cost error is forty percent of the profit.
Your job list, contract values, and cost to date. We produce a WIP schedule from your own data.
The problems
Percent complete, earned revenue, over- and under-billing, rebuilt in a workbook every month. Your surety and your bank both read it, and one person can produce it.
Ten percent held across a dozen jobs is real money invisible in a standard AR report, and it is the first thing a lender asks about.
Work proceeds on a verbal approval and gets billed three months later, or not at all. This is the largest recoverable leak in most contractors.
Committed cost from open POs and subcontracts is not in the ledger, so cost-to-complete is an estimate rather than a calculation.
Prevailing wage, fringe, and certified reporting on public work, plus lien waivers and insurance certificates per subcontractor per draw.
Joint ventures and single-purpose entities multiply fast, and consolidating them by hand each month is the norm rather than the exception.
Work in progress
Overbilling is borrowed cash that has to be earned back. Underbilling is work you have done and not invoiced. Both are normal; both become dangerous when nobody sees them until the schedule is rebuilt at month end.
An overbilled portfolio looks like healthy cash and is a liability — you have been paid for work not yet performed, and the earnings will arrive without the cash to match. Contractors get into trouble in the quarter after a big overbilled job finishes, and a live WIP schedule is the only warning you get.
Where the money goes
A representative shape for a general contractor. Note the size of the subcontractor line — most of your cost is other people’s work, which is why committed cost and change-order discipline matter more here than anywhere else.
Your stack
Benchmarks
From engagements with contractors between $15M and $120M in annual volume. Small sample, stated deliberately.
In nearly every contractor we work with, the largest single recoverable leak is change orders performed and never billed, or billed so late that the owner disputes them. It is not a systems problem in origin — it starts with a superintendent agreeing to something on site — but it becomes one the moment there is nowhere structured for that agreement to land.
What fixes it is unglamorous: a change order object that exists from the moment work is discussed, carries a status, ages like a receivable, and appears on the same report as the job’s cost-to-complete. Once unbilled change orders are visible next to margin, the conversation with the owner happens in week two rather than at closeout.
A job cost report built from posted invoices is always behind, because the largest costs — subcontracts and material orders — are committed long before anyone bills you. Without committed cost in the calculation, cost-to-complete is a project manager’s estimate wearing the authority of an accounting number.
Bringing open purchase orders and subcontract balances into the job cost view is a modest piece of work with a disproportionate effect: percent complete stops being an opinion, and the WIP schedule stops needing to be argued about.
Heavy civil, self-perform with large equipment fleets, and contractors needing full field operations — daily logs, drawings, RFIs, submittals — should run Procore or Autodesk for the field and integrate with us for the financials. We are the accounting and job-cost layer, not a field management platform, and we are not the right answer for anyone wanting one system for both.
Questions
Send your job list and cost to date. We will produce the schedule from your own data before you commit to anything.