Regular job cost reporting is vital for agency profitability.
Most agency management systems feature detailed job cost reports. Running these reports regularly, will allow you to monitor and catch overruns, reduce scope creep and minimise over servicing.
Now more than ever, you can’t afford for staff to be working for free. Monitoring the costs on your jobs regularly will help reduce this. Alternatively, if you have made the decision internally to invest in key clients, this should be tracked and measured rather than simply over-delivering.
Running job cost reports at the end of a job, means you have effectively been working blind. It’s too late to control any scope creep or over servicing and your job profitability will suffer.
A good idea is to run these reports for your weekly WIP meetings. As you discuss your jobs you can also review how they’re tracking.
Running these reports regularly also allows you to spot if time and expenses haven’t been added to the job. This means if some of your team are a bit slack at time-sheeting or POs have not been raised, you can ensure you are catching these weekly.
Let’s take a closer look at job cost reporting in these specific agency management systems:
AccountAbility
AccountAbility has several views and reports to monitor job costs. There’s some great job summary views including:
- The financial summary – providing key financial data for each job.
- The profitability summary – showing profitability data for each job.
- The time summary – providing time data for each job.
There’s also a traditional JCR that provides a detailed listing of transactions by a Job, grouped at the task type level.
Watch our video to find out how AccountAbility’s job cost reporting works in practice.
Deltek WorkBook
Deltek WorkBook also has a few ways to monitor jobs costs. Two of our favourite views are the Jobs List and the Job Costs tab.
WorkBook’s job list views are customisable with their modify grid feature. Have your list setup correctly and you’ll be able to compare the estimate total with time and expenses recorded on the on so far. So immediately you can see if your job is on target or you’re if you’re over servicing.
The job cost summary is broken down by activity and gives key financials on a job. This view can also be used to check progress through the life of the job. It shows all the expenses on a job so you can compare it to the schedule, approved estimate & invoice.
Watch our video to see how job cost reporting is done in WorkBook.
We’ll be adding to this list, so keep an eye out for your preferred agency software.
Remember: Whatever agency system you use, you should monitor job costs regularly.
