Same company, same software, same industry. In 2019 they built a job costing setup with 400 cost categories, and it was dead within eight months. In 2022 they tried again with 40 categories, and it stuck. The difference wasn’t the tool. It was three decisions about people.
This is a 120-person specialty contractor doing $60 million a year with about 30 active jobs at any given time. The first attempt failed so completely that project managers were keeping private spreadsheets and emailing them to accounting every Friday.
Attempt one tracked everything and told nobody anything
The 2019 build had a category for every eventuality: travel, small tools, permits, disposal, equipment rental, sub-tier cleanup, and several dozen more. Entering a single purchase order took eleven fields.
- Project managers stopped coding costs because it was slow, so costs landed on the wrong job.
- Reports came out three weeks after month-end, which made them history instead of management.
- Nobody saw their own job’s numbers, because the whole report ran to 60 pages.
By month eight the reports existed and nobody opened them. The controller used a sentence that every ERP Consulting team hears at least once: “We have the data, we just can’t use it.”
The three decisions that made attempt two different
They rebuilt the same capability with one rule in mind — a project manager should be able to see a job’s health in under two minutes, on a phone, without asking anyone. Their IT lead still jokes that the biggest contribution was the phrase “delete that field.”
- Forty cost categories, not four hundred. Anything unusual goes to “other” with a note, and the list grows by one only when the same note shows up five times.
- Costs are coded by the person who spends the money, at the moment they spend it. No Friday catch-up. If a crew buys a permit, it’s coded from the truck.
- Each project manager sees their jobs and only their jobs. Not a company-wide report. Four numbers: cost to date, percent complete, remaining budget, and hours over or under.
That was the whole redesign. Fewer fields, earlier coding, smaller view. It cost about a third of what the first attempt did, because most of that first attempt’s effort went into building reports nobody wanted.
What the project managers actually do with it now
The change shows up in how they talk. Instead of asking the controller how a job is doing, they know before the morning meeting. Two jobs were renegotiated mid-stream last year because the numbers surfaced at 40% complete rather than 90%.
According to the operations director, about $1.4 million in overruns were caught early enough to do something about. The 2019 version caught the same overruns three weeks too late to matter.
Before you redesign your job costing, ask three project managers to show you where they look for their numbers today. If the honest answer is “I call accounting,” you don’t have a reporting problem. You have a timing problem, and timing is fixable.