Better Roads Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/109757
HighwayContractor By Daniel C. Brown, Contributing Editor REAL COSTS VS. BUDGETED COSTS = + $ Software handles the uncertainty between estimates and actual job costs A n Iowa-based contractor has won 80 percent of the available bonus payments on a successful 18-mile, two-lane asphalt paving project near Grinnell, Iowa. Contractors today can compare real daily job costs to estimated budgets and determine whether or not they actually made or lost money on a given day. It wasn't always so. Historically, contractors used their accounting system, which had a job cost module, to do cost reporting. You could compare actual costs to budgeted costs on a monthly basis out of your accounting system. To work with accurate data, the accounting system needs to be current with all the bills, and all the time sheets, 6 February 2013 Better Roads and the entire payroll, in order to produce a comprehensive cost report. "That's the way it was from the dawn of time," says Christian Burger, an IT consultant to the construction industry and a frequent speaker at meetings of the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC). "Then what happened was that the systems that were producing the estimates – those from HCSS, Hard Dollar and Bid2Win (now B2W) – said that the contractor doesn't want to wait a month to get actual costs. "Contractors said, 'We've got this estimated data here,we can make these comparisons,'" says Burger. So now what has emerged is a field-cost tracking