What does ship repair job costing need?
A repair yard learns its real margin months late, or live. The difference is four data streams and one job number.
Answered in short
5 things that decide this
- 01Ship repair job costing needs labor hours captured daily by trade and cost code, because multi-trade work across welders, electricians, painters and riggers is where estimates drift first.
- 02Materials, rentals and subcontractor invoices must land against the vessel's job number as they occur, not at month-end reconciliation.
- 03Change orders need capture at the moment of discovery. Growth work found when steel is opened up is normal in repair; unpriced growth work is how a profitable job goes quietly underwater.
- 04Progress needs comparing against the estimate while the vessel is still in the yard, when corrective action is possible.
- 05Marina and yard software coverage puts the stakes plainly: fragmented paper processes cost some operations up to a fifth of revenue through billing leakage and process breakdowns.
The estimate was fine. The capture was not.
Yards blame losing jobs on bad estimates. The estimate is usually the healthiest document in the building. What fails is capture: hours written on timecards that reach the office Friday, materials pulled from stores without a job number, a growth-work conversation on the dock that never became paper.
Repair work makes this worse than new construction. A repair job is discovery. You open a tank and find the real scope. The industry norm of estimates, work orders, parts and billing living in separate systems, with staff re-typing between them, means the discovered scope outruns the recorded scope for the whole docking.
The result arrives with the accountant, months later: a job everyone felt good about, underwater on labor nobody logged against it.
- The test of a costing system is a Tuesday question: what has this vessel consumed so far, against what we estimated? If the answer takes days, there is no costing system.
The four streams, and the one number they share
Labor, daily, by trade and cost code, entered where the work happens. A foreman with a tablet at the vessel beats a timecard batch every time, and it is the difference between managing a job and autopsying one.
Materials and subs, committed at purchase. The PO carries the job number, so cost exists when the obligation exists, not when the invoice surfaces.
Change orders, priced and acknowledged before the work proceeds where the contract allows, and captured same-day everywhere else. Growth work is legitimate revenue in repair. Uncaptured growth work is a donation.
And the comparison layer: estimate versus actual, by cost code, visible to the project manager daily. Compliance records, permits, QA sign-offs, ride along on the same job number, because a dispute will ask for them together.
- None of this requires an enterprise shipyard ERP. It requires the streams your yard already produces to land in one connected place.
- EstimateBy trade and cost code
- Capture dailyHours and materials at the vessel
- Change ordersPriced at discovery, in writing
- CompareActual vs estimate, every morning
- Invoice + learnBilling complete, next estimate smarter
The loop closes twice: the invoice collects the money, the history sharpens the next bid.
Related questions
01Our foremen will not type. Does capture die there?+
Capture dies when it asks foremen to do office work. It survives when it asks less than the current paper does: a tablet checklist, a photo of the material ticket, a voice note that becomes a change-order draft. Design for gloves and weather, and the data arrives.
02How do change orders work when the owner is unreachable?+
The contract sets the rule; the system enforces it. Document the discovery with photos and a priced scope the same day, flag work that cannot wait, and keep the acknowledgment trail in one place. Disputes are lost on missing paper far more often than on disagreement.
03What about government and Navy work?+
Government repair contracts raise the record-keeping bar: labor by contract line item, certified payrolls, audit trails. That strengthens the case for capture against one job structure, because the same streams feed both your margin view and the compliance package.
04Where does this usually start?+
With one vessel. Trace a recent job from estimate to final invoice and mark every point where cost existed but the record did not. That map, usually drawn in an afternoon, is the honest requirements document for whatever you build next.
