Six Things You Must Know About Job Costing in Construction
Tomorrow you have a task to do. What will the price be? You might be losing out on a lot of money if you’re only making rough estimates based on your prior employment. Tracking and lowering expenses are essential to success in construction, whether you’re a general contractor or a speciality contractor.
Often, the market determines the price of your offer. Therefore you need to be ready to compete on pricing. Thus, the key to greater profitability is improved cost management and gradual expense reduction. By using construction job costing software, you may increase the precision of your future bids and have greater control and understanding of your costs.
- What Is Construction Job Costing?
Construction job costing is a technique for monitoring, allocating, and estimating expenses on a project-by-project basis. Traditionally, labour, materials, equipment, and other overhead costs are included in job pricing.
Process costing can be substituted with job costing. Using process costing, you would offer a rough estimate of what you could expect to pay based on your past experience. Knowing that you charge a set amount for a job of a specific size makes it where you know, you can do a job half its size for about half its cost.
However, your personnel, materials, and equipment may fail in various ways when working on construction projects. What if a single piece of equipment ends up costing you a set amount regardless of the size of the job? If this is the case, that can cause you to lose money if you simply cut the price of the job in half.
- Difference Between Job and Process Costing
Estimating the cost of a project using process costing is often done for projects with a broader scope since it is a more straightforward and simplified approach. For example, installing a roof may have an average cost of x dollars, but job costing delves further into the specific expenses involved to produce more realistic forecasts.
- It’s Important to Break Down Your Expenses
When you break out your estimates, it helps you place bids more precisely, but it also helps you pinpoint exactly which aspects of a task you are underestimating or overestimating. Using cost codes is an efficient technique to “bucket” expenditures for each project component. It can be a hassle to assign time to certain cost codes; however, if your team uses a time-tracking tool that was developed specifically for contractors, this process will be simplified for them.
- It’s Crucial to Figure Out Labour Burden Accurately
The amount of work that must be done indicates the administrative costs connected with payroll. If you don’t calculate your labour load, your expenses won’t be accurate, and you’ll end up paying a lot more on overhead than you anticipated.
- Closely Monitor Client Billings
Reimbursable charges must be compensated; failing to do so will result in a financial loss for your business. However, the billings to customers are frequently inaccurate because the expenses are either not being collected or are not being accurately ascribed. Increased client reimbursements can be achieved through the use of construction job costing software like Jonas Premier. This software can directly assign payroll and other expenditures to specific projects.
- Continuously Track Job Costs
Far too many contractors wait until the completion of a project before determining whether they earned a profit and determining the source of any cost overruns that may have occurred. Utilize software that provides a live picture of how your expenses are tracked to guide your projects in the appropriate direction. This may be accomplished by using real-time job costing software.