Construction
Job costing that cannot disagree with your financials.
Every cost line in iPACER carries three dimensions at once — account, project and CSI cost code — and every one of them is a line in the general ledger. WIP, over- and under-billing, and margin by job are views of the books, not a parallel set of numbers maintained beside them.
Three dimensions, one entry
Most systems make you pick: code it for accounting or code it for the job. Coding it once, for both, is the whole design.
Account
Where it lands in the general ledger. The chart of accounts is yours to configure, not a fixed template you work around.
Project
Which job absorbed the cost. Every project carries its own budget, contract value, change orders and committed costs.
Cost code
CSI MasterFormat classification, so labor on one division is comparable across every job you have ever run.
Lead to closeout, without re-keying
The CRM drives project creation, so the estimate that won the work is the budget that measures it.
- 01
Lead
Inbound work enters the CRM, not a spreadsheet. Nothing downstream is orphaned from where it came from.
- 02
Bid
Estimate by cost code. The bid becomes the budget baseline instead of being retyped into a different system.
- 03
Project
A won opportunity creates the project skeleton with its budget already coded. There are no orphan projects.
- 04
Cost
Vendor invoices, timecards, purchase orders and equipment all post against account, project and cost code at once.
- 05
Billing
Progress billing with retainage withheld to its own account, so retainage is a receivable you can see rather than a note in a memo field.
- 06
Closeout
Punch list, final retainage release, and a job cost history that still reconciles to the ledger years later.
Questions estimators actually ask
- Why do budget-to-actual reports never match the financials?
- Because job cost and accounting are usually two systems reconciled by hand. In iPACER a cost line is a journal line. Budget-to-actual is a view of the ledger, so it cannot drift from the income statement.
- How is retainage handled?
- Withheld retainage posts to its own receivable account when the progress invoice is sent, and releases as a separate transaction at closeout. It never hides inside accounts receivable where it inflates what you think is collectible.
- Do change orders affect the budget automatically?
- An approved change order adjusts contract value and budget together. Approval is restricted to admins and managers, the approver is recorded from the authenticated session rather than a text field, and rejection is captured with the same rigor as approval.
- Can I see committed cost, not just spent cost?
- Yes. Open purchase orders are committed against the job, so remaining budget accounts for what you have already promised a vendor, not only what has been invoiced.
- What about equipment used on my own jobs?
- Internal equipment usage is costed to the job the same way rented equipment is billed to a customer, so a self-performed job carries honest equipment cost instead of appearing artificially profitable.
Renting equipment out as well? See oilfield equipment rental.
Bring your cost code structure
We will load your divisions and show you what budget-to-actual looks like against a live ledger.