There's a scene every contractor knows. The month ends, you sit down over the invoices, and start adding things up. Material costs from here, subcontractor invoices from there, labor from the notebook. Two hours later a number comes out — and either you celebrate, or you scratch your head wondering how this happened.
The problem isn't that you can't do math. It's that by the time the picture forms, it's already too late. The money is spent, the decisions are made, and you've already priced the next similar job.
That's how it went for us too, for years. The turning point came when, on one project, we started logging work hours weekly, assigned to line items — and compared them against what we'd budgeted. It turned out one trade had used almost one and a half times the hours we'd priced for. We didn't find out at month-end — we found out in the third week. That gave us time to act: we looked at what was slowing the crew down, and the project didn't slide into a loss.
That's the difference between post-costing and tracking as you go. One tells you what happened. The other gives you time to step in.
And here's the key point: every price is built on an assumption about how many hours a given job should take. Tektana calculates this from real-cost and productivity norms — meaning every line item comes with a planned hour count. Put actual worked hours next to that, and you instantly see where the project stands — and how your crew's output compares to what the price assumes.
Today we see this in Tektana, for every project, in real time. But the point isn't the software — it's that you shouldn't have to find out where you stand from adding things up at month-end.
In the next article we look at where a reliable planned figure comes from: what a workday, a machine hour, actually cost — and what your crew can really deliver.