Fifteen PMs, fifteen spreadsheets
Give every PM one form, one deadline, and one approval.
Each PM built his own sheet years ago and each one forecasts a little differently. One adds a contingency, one leaves out the last invoice, and one only updates when asked. As CFO you spend the first week of every month rebuilding their numbers so they can be added up. Your bank and surety get a WIP that's only as good as your slowest PM, and you can't compare one PM to another.
Three moves, in order
What CFOS does about it
CFOS gives every PM the same entry screen. The PM enters the month end cost to complete against the same cost codes, and it's approved before it goes into the WIP schedule. The master WIP rolls every job together with over and under billing, so you aren't rebuilding anything. Roles and permissions control which jobs and which numbers each person sees, so a PM works in his own jobs and you see all of them.
Who owns this: CFO.
At $40M with fifteen PMs, merging each sheet costs an hour. That's fifteen hours every month. That time should go to review, not chasing.
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Step 08: Standards and accountability
Five hours a month of owner time, spent projecting the work.
Other problems step 08 solves
Other things that go wrong
What owners ask
Project managers different spreadsheets?
Give every PM one form, one deadline, and one approval. Each PM built his own sheet years ago and each one forecasts a little differently. One adds a contingency, one leaves out the last invoice, and one only updates when asked. As CFO you spend the first week of every month rebuilding their numbers so they can be added up. Your bank and surety get a WIP that's only as good as your slowest PM, and you can't compare one PM to another.
Which part of the system fixes this?
The step is number 08, standards and accountability. Five hours a month of owner time, spent projecting the work. It's drawn from chapter 8 of CONTROL: C.F.O.S. Construction Financial Operating System.
Is this normal for my trade?
Across the 48 trades that publish a figure, net profit at $1M to $5M averages 7% before taxes. If you're well under that and this page describes your month, the two are usually the same story. The published average tells you where the pack is, and your own job costing tells you where you are, which is the number that pays payroll.
Where do I start?
Write one cost to complete form for every PM, with the same cost codes, the same deadline, and the same rules for contingency.
Do PMs resist moving off their own spreadsheets?
Some do at first, usually the ones whose numbers were hardest to check. Most come around when the form is shorter than their sheet and the job cost is already filled in. Keep the first month simple and let the approval step do the accountability work.
Who should approve a PM's cost to complete?
Someone above the PM, usually the controller or the CFO, or the operations lead on large jobs. The person approving should read the changes since last month, and not only the total. A second set of eyes catches most of the bad forecasts.
Can I fix this without touching anything else?
You can try, and it doesn't hold. Step 08 depends on step 03, overhead calculation and step 06, project management and step 07, monthly cadence. Install it ahead of those and it produces numbers the field won't trust, which is worse than the problem you started with.
Wrote CONTROL, the 8 step system behind these figures. More about the author.