Self Perform Resource Tracking

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All construction companies juggle the three essential elements to success; get work, do work, keep score. For the self perform contractor, the responsibilities for doing work and keeping score often compete for the time of the same people. Because completing work and keeping an owner happy remains the highest priority for the project manager or jobsite superintendent, detailed accounting of labor, materials, equipment and subcontractors can sometimes languish. In spite of these competing priorities, construction companies depend on detailed and accurate job costing to be profitable.

Methods of job costing in the field vary from one company to the next, but often include some combination of paper, spreadsheets and job cost software. Over the last decade, construction project managers, especially those doing self perform work, rely on construction project management systems to provide current information to owners. These systems provide many advantages to field management, but are often not used to track costs at the level of detail required for accounting purposes. An unintended result of these systems in the field has been increased pressure from owners and management alike to produce reports that are “current”.

The resulting redundant process for construction labor tracking is now widespread throughout the construction industry: filling out timecards and job costing sheets, followed by entry into two or more systems. Cost codes and cost types may or may not be the same between systems, and in either case costing must be repeated in each system. While this duplicate effort ensures that people are paid and most costs are charged against the project, it also becomes a serious distraction from the work involved in actually completing projects. Furthermore, the accounting system and project management systems may report very different views of a job's profitability at any point in time. Some companies attempt to reconcile this by shuffling data between systems with a cumbersome import/export process. Others simply resign themselves to not having a true picture of profitability until the job is complete. Neither of these outcomes are ideal.

Modern construction software like Resource Commander combines the required capabilities for both cost management and payroll in one system. Project managers can immediately view costs from a job perspective and process approved labor for payroll. Real time impact against budgeted hours and/or dollars is immediately reflected as employee time is entered. The same capability is supported for tracking equipment, materials and subcontractors. All of this is done without requiring any duplicate entry. Payroll time can be uploaded directly to an integrated accounting system. All costing data can be fed into a job cost accounting system, project management system or both. The resulting process eliminates inefficiencies in both the field and the office, and provides a dramatic increase in accuracy and real time availability of reports.

Learn more about how Resource Commander tracks Employees, Equipment and other costs.

For more than 20 years, ACS Connect has provided Construction Software and Consulting Services, helping specialty contractors, general contractors and construction managers to become more efficient and profitable.