For the owner who wants to know if the job made money

What the owner looks at in CFOS

The owner seat is the smallest seat in the software on purpose. You aren't entering bills or coding costs. You look at a handful of numbers, decide a few things and let the office do the rest.

Everything you see comes from QuickBooks Online and from what your PMs and office enter in CFOS. QuickBooks keeps the books. CFOS reads them every hour and gives you the answer.

The CEO Report against your trade targets

Once a month you open the CEO Report. It lays out your gross margin, overhead and net profit, and grades each one against the published average and the CFOS target for your trade and size. Net profit is always before taxes.

The CFOS target rule is simple. Net profit target is 10 percent before taxes or the industry average plus 3.5 points, whichever is higher. Overhead target is the average minus 1 point, and gross margin target is the net target plus the overhead target.

You can look at a sample on the CEO Report sample page before you ever sign up. When your number is below target, you know whether to look at pricing, at overhead or at the jobs themselves. That's a short list, and it's the same list every month.

The 13 week cash forecast and the jobs list

Each week you check the 13 week cash forecast. It reads your QuickBooks and your pay apps, and it marks the lowest week so you see a tight spot before payroll does. If the low week is close, you know to push collections or slow a purchase.

Then you look at the jobs list. Each job shows cost against the budget by cost code, so you see which ones are making money and which ones aren't. You can ask Claude or ChatGPT about any job in plain words, since it reads your numbers and can't change them.

The few things that need your yes

Owners approve a short list. Change orders over the limit you set, cost to complete on a job that's slipping and a bid you're about to submit all come to you. The rest is the office's work.

Permissions are set per person, so your PMs see their jobs and your office manager sees AP and AR. You decide who sees margins by job, and you can change it any time. Your office manager never has to wonder what they're allowed to open.

What you stop doing

You don't ask your bookkeeper for a profit and loss and then try to work out which job is in it. Opening QuickBooks to find a number is over too. And you aren't guessing whether the check will clear before payroll.

You also stop waiting for the tax return to learn how the year went. The owner seat is a weekly look and a monthly review, so it fits inside a week you already don't have time for. Most of the work goes to the people who were doing it anyway.

• Asking for reports and waiting for them
• Guessing which jobs made money
• Finding out about a cash crunch on payroll day

This seat at each size

Under $10M, the owner is also the estimator, the collector and sometimes the PM. You use CFOS to see all of it in one place. The weekly look is yours alone.

From $10M to $50M, you have a controller or a senior bookkeeper who owns the monthly close and the WIP. You still read the CEO Report and the cash forecast. You sign off on what the controller builds instead of building it yourself.

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What people ask

• Job costing for contractors doing $1M to $10M a year
• Job costing and WIP for contractors doing $10M to $50M
• Know if you can make payroll in 13 weeks, not 13 hours
• One price. Every module. Priced by your revenue.
• Use all of it, or just the part you need

QuickBooks is a trademark of Intuit Inc. Run On CFOS isn't affiliated with Intuit.