The job's on site. Is it still making the money you priced it to make?

You win the job, you allow the costs, you get on site. Eight weeks in, someone asks how it's tracking and you genuinely don't know. You've got invoices piling up, labour on the timesheet, materials on order, but nothing lined up against what you actually allowed at tender. By the time you do the sums, the job's finished and the answer is whatever it is.

By then it's too late to do anything about it. The overrun has already happened.

Costs drift quietly, then all at once

A job rarely blows its budget in one big hit. It's a few extra days of labour here, a materials price that crept up there, a package that cost more than allowed because the scope on site wasn't quite what was priced. Each one is small. None of them trigger an alarm on their own. It's only when you add them up against the original allowance that you see the job's in trouble, and by then the work is already done.

Check what's spent against what was allowed

The way to catch this while there's still time to do something about it is to keep the job's actual costs running against the allowance from the original bill, trade by trade, as the job progresses, not just at the end. Labour against what was allowed for labour. Materials against what was allowed for materials. Each package against its own line, not lumped into one number that hides where the problem actually is.

This only works if the original allowance was measured properly in the first place. We measure every job to NRM2, so what you're checking site costs against is a real quantity and a real rate, not a rough guess that was never going to hold up as a comparison.

Catch the overrun while you can still do something about it

A job that's drifting off its allowance is a problem you can manage if you see it in week four. It's just a loss if you see it in the final account.

Send your drawings and we'll measure the job properly so you've got a real allowance to track against. See a sample estimate to see how the figures are broken down.

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