A month-end profit and loss statement is an autopsy. It tells you, accurately and far too late, that a job you finished in April lost money. The crew has moved on, the change order window has closed, the customer has been invoiced, and the only remaining decision is how to absorb it.
The same job was legible in week two. Labor hours were running ahead of percentage complete. Material costs had crept past the allowance. A change was made in the field and never written up. Every one of those is visible in data you already have — it just is not on one page in front of anyone whose job it is to care.
| Number | What it tells you | What it prevents |
|---|---|---|
| Signed backlog | Dollars and weeks of committed work ahead | Hiring or laying off a crew a quarter too late |
| Work in progress | Costs incurred versus billed, over and under billings | A profitable year that runs out of cash |
| Gross margin by job | Actual against bid, per active job | Sending your best crew to your worst job |
| Receivables aging | What is 30, 60, 90+ days out, and moving which way | Financing your customer without deciding to |
| Crew utilization | Billable hours against hours paid | Paying for capacity you never sold |
| Change orders | Issued against approved, and unbilled work performed | Doing work for free and calling it service |
| Cash and runway | Cash on hand in weeks of payroll and payables | Finding out on a Thursday |
WIP compares what a job has cost you against what you have billed for it. Bill less than you have earned and you are underbilled — you are lending your customer money out of your own working capital, at zero percent, without having agreed to. Bill more than you have earned and you are overbilled — the profit sitting on your P&L is not yours yet, and it will reverse.
Most contractors under $10M do not run a WIP schedule at all. That is not carelessness; it is that nobody ever built them one and their accountant only produces it at year end for the surety or the bank. It is also the single most common reason a contractor posts a profitable year and cannot make payroll in the same quarter.
Run your own WIP schedule right now, free. Four jobs, five numbers each, no email and no signup. It will tell you in about two minutes how much working capital you have quietly advanced to your customers.
There is also a free Excel weekly flash template that does this every week alongside backlog, receivables aging, crew utilization, change order capture and cash runway. Type one row a week and the one-pager rebuilds itself.
Every system exports differently. ServiceTitan calls it one thing, Buildertrend another, and your QuickBooks cost codes were set up by whoever was around in 2019. Pulling the same underlying facts out of all of them, lining them up against the bid and the prior week, and drafting the commentary is mechanical, repetitive and exactly what a system should do. It does not get bored on the ninth job.
Deciding is different. Whether a margin slip is a bad estimate or a bad week, whether a job is genuinely underwater or simply billed behind, whether to press a foreman who is otherwise your best — that needs someone who has made those calls with real money at stake. So an operator reads every report before you do. How that split works.
| Revenue | What usually makes sense | Rough annual cost |
|---|---|---|
| Under ~$2M | Do it yourself on a fixed weekly slot | $0 plus your time |
| ~$2M to ~$30M | Outsource it; the work is real but not full-time | $15,000 to $54,000 |
| Above ~$30M | Hire a construction controller in-house | $95,000 to $140,000 loaded |
The band in the middle is where almost every contractor sits, and it is the band nobody serves well. A bookkeeper will not tell you job 214 is underwater. A CPA will tell you in March. A full controller is a $120,000 answer to a fifteen-hour-a-week question.
The Operations Audit takes ten business days and about an hour of your time, plus read-only access to your last three months of exports. You get the five most expensive gaps in your operation with the arithmetic shown on each one, and a 90-day plan. $1,500 flat, credited in full toward any install.
Email hello@rentcadenceai.comBecause it tells you about jobs that already finished. A job that will lose money is usually visible in week two, when labor hours start running ahead of the percentage complete, but a month-end P&L surfaces it in month three, after the crew has moved on and the change order window has closed. By then the only thing left to do is absorb it. Weekly job-cost reporting moves the discovery from after the fact to during the job, which is the only point where it can still be fixed.
Work in progress, or WIP, compares what a job has cost you so far against what you have billed for it so far. If you have billed less than you have earned, you are underbilled and financing your customer with your own cash. If you have billed more than you have earned, you are overbilled and the profit on your P&L is not real yet. Most contractors under $10M do not run a WIP schedule at all, which is precisely how a company shows a profitable year and runs out of cash in the same quarter.
Seven things: signed backlog in dollars and weeks, work in progress with over and under billings, gross margin by active job against the bid, receivables by aging bucket, crew hours billable against hours paid, change orders issued against change orders approved, and cash on hand with weeks of runway. That is one page. It takes about twenty minutes to read and it is the difference between managing the business and reacting to it.
No. The reporting is built on reading the exports your systems already produce. QuickBooks, ServiceTitan, Jobber, Housecall Pro, Buildertrend, Procore, Sage 100 Contractor and Foundation all export the same underlying facts under different labels; normalizing them is mechanical work a system does well. Asking you to migrate software to fix a reporting problem would be trading a small problem for a large one.
A bookkeeper tells you what happened and has to be right for tax and lender purposes. This tells you what to do next week and has to be timely more than it has to be perfect. They use overlapping data to answer completely different questions, and you need both. The other difference is accountability: a bookkeeper is not going to tell you that job 214 is underwater and that you should stop sending your best crew to it.
A competent construction controller runs $95,000 to $140,000 a year fully loaded once bonus, payroll taxes and benefits are counted. That is defensible when there is genuinely forty hours a week of the work, which for most contractors means well north of $30M in revenue. Between roughly $2M and $30M the work is real but part-time, which is the band where outsourcing it costs a fraction and gets you someone who has read a lot more job-cost reports than a first controller hire will have.
A ten-day Operations Audit is $1,500 and credits in full toward any install. Installation of the reporting system starts at $9,500. Ongoing, weekly and monthly reporting is $1,250 a month, reporting plus management oversight is $2,500 a month, and a fractional operator who also runs the weekly calls and the budget process is $4,500 a month. Published, not quoted.
It does the reading, normalizing and flagging extremely well, and that is most of the hours. It can pull cost codes, labor hours, billings and receivables out of different systems, put them on one page against the bid, and draft the commentary. What it should not do alone is decide. Whether a job is underwater or just billed behind, and whether a margin slip is a bad estimate or a bad week, is judgment. An operator reviews every report before it reaches the owner.