| Job | Contract value | Est. total cost | Cost to date | Billed to date | % compl. | Earned | Over / (under) | Margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | — | — | — | |||||
| — | — | — | — | |||||
| — | — | — | — | |||||
| — | — | — | — | |||||
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Your target gross margin % — jobs below this get flagged.
Underbilled is cash out of your pocket. If the schedule says you are $80,000 underbilled, that is $80,000 of labor and material you have already paid for and not yet invoiced. It does not show up as a problem anywhere on your profit and loss statement, because on paper you earned that revenue. It shows up in your bank account, or rather it does not.
Overbilled is borrowed profit. Billing ahead of the work is good for cash and misleading for margin. That money still has to be earned, and if the job runs over, part of the profit already sitting on your income statement will come back off. A contractor who is heavily overbilled across the whole portfolio is funding today with tomorrow's work, which is fine right up until backlog thins.
Anything over 100% complete is the most urgent line on the page. It means costs have blown past the estimate at completion. The job is not 110% built. Either the estimate is stale or the job is losing money, and both need an answer this week.
WIP is not something QuickBooks produces on its own, and field software does not produce it either because field software does not know your estimate at completion. It falls in the gap between the two, which is exactly where it stays until a CPA assembles one once a year for the surety. By then it is a compliance document about a year that already happened.
The version that changes decisions is the one that runs every month, on jobs that are still open, with an estimate at completion that somebody actually re-thought. That is a habit, not a piece of software, and it is most of what FieldCadence AI installs.
The Operations Audit takes ten business days and read-only access to your last three months of exports. You get your real WIP position, the five most expensive gaps in the operation with the arithmetic shown, and a 90-day plan. $1,500 flat, credited in full toward any install.
Email hello@rentcadenceai.comA work-in-progress schedule compares, for every open job, what the job has cost you so far against what you have billed for it so far. It converts costs into an estimate of revenue actually earned, then shows whether your billing is ahead of that or behind it. Contractors on percentage-of-completion accounting are expected to produce one; most contractors under $10M only ever see it once a year, prepared by their CPA for the bank or the surety.
Underbilled means you have earned more revenue than you have billed. You have already spent the money on labor and material, the customer has not been invoiced for it yet, and you are covering the gap out of your own working capital. It is an interest-free loan to your customer that you never agreed to make. On a formal balance sheet it appears as costs and estimated earnings in excess of billings, and it is an asset — which disguises the fact that it is cash you do not have.
Overbilled means you have billed more than you have earned. The cash is pleasant and the profit is not real yet. That money still has to be worked off, and if the job runs over, some of the profit sitting on your income statement will reverse. On a balance sheet it appears as billings in excess of costs and estimated earnings, and it is a liability. A contractor who is heavily overbilled across the whole portfolio is spending money that belongs to future work.
The standard method is cost-to-cost: costs incurred to date divided by total estimated cost at completion. It is the method this calculator uses and the one your accountant almost certainly uses. Its weakness is that it assumes your cost estimate is right. If the estimate is stale, percent complete is wrong and so is everything downstream, which is why the estimate at completion has to be revisited honestly every month rather than left at bid.
It means costs incurred have passed the total estimated cost at completion. The job is not 110% built; the estimate is wrong or the job is losing money. Either way it is the single most urgent line on the schedule and it should be re-estimated this week, not at month end.
Monthly at minimum, weekly if the jobs are short or the volume is high. The value is in the movement rather than the snapshot: a job drifting from overbilled to underbilled over three months is telling you something a single month's report cannot. Running it once a year for the bank is a compliance exercise, not a management tool.
No, and it is not meant to be. This is a management tool for seeing your position clearly in about five minutes. A schedule for a lender or a surety needs your accountant, proper revenue recognition treatment, and reconciliation to your general ledger. Use this to find out whether you have a problem; use your CPA to report it.
No. Everything runs in your browser, nothing is transmitted anywhere, and there is no email field, no signup and no cookie. Close the tab and it is gone.