How do daily reports reach job cost?
Every GC has a version of the same pipeline. The difference between firms is how many days each handoff eats before a PM sees true cost.
The pipeline, named
5 things that decide this
- 01A daily report reaches the job-cost ledger through five handoffs: field capture, cost coding, timecard reconciliation, accounting posting and month-end review. Each handoff done on paper or by re-keying adds days.
- 02AGC surveys document the gap: contractors are investing in technology while field processes stay manual, with daily reports, timecards and T&M tickets still travelling as paper or photos of paper.
- 03The lag matters because a job bleeds where labour burns faster than the estimate. A PM who learns that three weeks later has three weeks fewer options.
- 04The fix is not a bigger report. It is capturing quantities and hours already coded, at the source, so the superintendent's entry is the accounting entry.
- 05T&M work is the sharpest case. A T&M ticket that reaches billing coded and signed becomes revenue. One that surfaces at month end becomes an argument.
Five handoffs, each with its own delay
The superintendent writes the daily report at the end of a ten-hour day: crews, quantities, weather, delays. It reaches the office as a PDF or a notebook page. Someone translates what happened into cost codes, and does it from a description written by a person who was not thinking in cost codes. Timecards arrive separately and rarely agree with the report. Accounting posts what survives. The month-end review then discovers the differences.
Every translation step is where accuracy leaks. The coding clerk guesses which phase a crew worked. The timecard says nine hours where the report implies eight. None of it is dishonesty. It is the same day described three times by three documents that never met.
- FieldSuper logs quantities against cost codes
- CrewHours captured per code, same screen
- SyncOne record, no re-keying
- PostLedger entries generated, not typed
- PM viewCost vs estimate, days old not weeks
The design rule: the person closest to the work picks from a short list of codes for that job, and nobody downstream re-describes what happened.
A field record accounting can post
The structure below is the whole template. Keep it this small on purpose: a report that takes more than ten minutes at the end of a shift gets thinner every week until it is a weather note.
- 01Crews on site, with hours per crew against a cost code picked from the job's own short list.
- 02Quantities installed per code, in the estimate's units so earned value computes without translation.
- 03Delays and causes, with duration, because a documented weather day defends a schedule claim later.
- 04T&M work as its own entry with the client representative's signature captured on the spot.
- 05Photos tied to the entries they evidence, not loose in a camera roll.
Field and office questions
01Why not buy the module our accounting system sells?+
Sometimes that works, and it is worth piloting first. The common failure is field adoption: modules designed by accounting vendors ask field staff to think in accounting screens. If your supers will not use it, the data never arrives, and the module's reports are built on blanks.
02How do we keep cost coding accurate in the field?+
Shorten the list. A superintendent choosing among eight codes relevant to this job codes accurately. One scrolling through the full corporate chart of accounts does not. The system should carry the mapping from short list to ledger codes, not the person.
03What changes for T&M tickets specifically?+
They get captured as their own signed record the day the work happens, with the client representative signing on a screen. Billing then invoices from a signed artifact instead of reconstructing one at month end, which is where T&M revenue usually leaks.
04Does this require replacing our project management platform?+
No. The gap this closes sits between field documents and the cost ledger, which most platforms bridge only with exports and re-keying. Purpose-built capture can write to both sides through their existing interfaces, keeping the tools your teams already know.
Related
- Construction software development →Not on the site? It doesn't exist. What we build for contractors.
- Construction work →Field records that hold up in a dispute.
- Reconciliation →Why the same day described by three documents never agrees.
- Business process automation →Automation that runs unattended, on your own infrastructure.
