What To Do With Your Job Costing Data

Sometimes it can feel like you “should” do all these “things” in your business.

Ask clients for reviews.

Know your numbers.

Have digital invoicing

Create a better sales process.

Know your numbers.

Do job costing.

You get the idea…

And it can feel like you get sucked down the vortex of doing them all, but what’s the point?

Just to do more things, and look at more numbers, and be busier?

What’s the benefit?

What’s the outcome?

It’s easy to get sucked into all the “doing”, but not actually leverage the work you’re doing, to create a better outcome for the future.

An example?

You’re “doing” job costing.

You’re tracking time and allocating it to the job.

You’re entering every receipt into the job.

You’re tracking all materials to the job.

And you may even be glancing at that job costing screen.

And right here is where many contractors stop…

…but if this is where you stop, you’re doing 80% of the work and only getting 20% of the benefit.

Why?

Because you haven’t done anything with that information on that job costing screen yet.

What do I mean by “done anything”?

80% of the value in job costing is in:

• holding a post-job review with your crew
• analyzing the job costing data and updating templates and production rates to improve future estimates

These two things take far less effort than all the tracking and allocating does, but carry a serious value for your company.

The reason is, these two things help you realize, analyze, learn, course correct and improve for the next job.

When you hold post-job reviews with your team, and you’re all looking at the job costing screen together, the quality of your learning goes up.

And the quality of your suggestions on how to improve for the next one goes up exponentially.

Because guess who will likely have better ideas than you will on how to improve, be more efficient, and give suggestions to the estimator for more accurate bidding?

Your crew.

And when your crew sees you leaning in, asking their perspective, their opinions, and sees you taking their contribution seriously…. what happens?

You get tremendous buy in from your crew.

Huge boost.

We’re not done yet.

Now that you’ve held the post-job review, it’s time to see if you should update any templates and production rates.

Is this the 3rd time you’ve gone over on hours for this type of work?

Time to update that production rate so that the next estimate has the correct amount of hours in it.

The amount of hours that reflects what your track record actually shows it takes.

Another example: you notice a material or two that was recorded as used, but you had overlooked them in your template and estimate?

Time to add those materials to your template – so they don’t get missed on the next estimate.

So… you see what I mean?

The 80/20 rule.

So many contractors are expending 80% of the effort but stop short, and only get 20% of the value.

Think about where you are in your business now, and determine what is the next thing you need to add to your process to leverage more value out of all the work you are already doing.

If you want to see how SynkedUP makes job costing easy for contractors and enables all these principles I’m talking about, check out this explanation of what it looks like to job cost with SynkedUP.

It’s about finding leverage.

And when you identify where you can gain leverage, crank that lever hard.

Go get ‘em.

Weston Zimmerman

SynkedUP CEO & founder