Work In Progress Reporting

A favorite adage of mine is “you can’t improve what you don’t measure.” But you have to know what you want to determine before you can know what needs to be measured. In construction, the industry with the lowest start-up survival rate nationwide*, what most business owners need to know is as simple as this – are we going to make it?

One common challenge that construction companies face is not knowing whether a job is profitable or not profitable until it is too late. We know the key to long-term success is being consistently profitable, job after job, year after year. Implementing business intelligence tools like Work in Progress (WIP) Reporting allows you to regularly measure the health of your company to build your success for generations to come.

The WIP Report in ConstructionSuite provides high-level calculations of your company financials which allows for you to answer several important questions for assessing your success –

How accurate am I with my initial estimates?

Where do we stand on Project A? Project F? Companywide?

Have we paid our bills? What’s outstanding?

Are we making money?

Our goal is to make sure our customers – working in any given market – have the most insight of any professionals in the industry. We create and provide a simple system that compiles pertinent information for you, allowing you to work smarter, not harder, and see the ultimate value from your construction management and accounting software solutions working together. As soon as you begin using ConstructionSuite, we begin building your WIP Report. As soon as you integrate with QuickBooks, that WIP Report becomes even more insightful.

WIP Reporting takes already available data from ConstructionSuite and QuickBooks, such as Original Contract Price, Change Orders, Actuals, Committed Costs, and Invoiced Amounts, and calculates additional figures for better project and company visibility. Information that can be gained from these calculations includes but is not limited to Cost to Completion, Original Estimated Gross Profit, Final Gross Profit %, % Cost Improvement (Slippage), Over/Under Figures, and more. Many banks, investors, and other organizations require WIP Reporting from companies on a regular basis to assess the health of the company and use this information as an integral component in making decisions about loans, credit lines, membership eligibility, and strategic partnership opportunities.

The mark of a successful contractor is in finding measures that can be repeated regularly to ensure profitable outcomes in all instances. ConstructionSuite’s WIP Reporting features provide repeatable, reliable processes that have been proven to build successful companies and turn failing businesses around.

*US Census Bureau places survival rate at 36.4% for construction businesses within first five years.

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Originally published August 14 2017, Updated September 27 2018

UDA Technologies Blog