Willow Bend was the job you would have pointed at. Four lots, one builder, the same plan set you had already wired twice on a subdivision eight miles north. You bid rough and trim at $50,900 a house. The crew knew the print by Lot 8. All four roughs passed on the first walk, which almost never happens. When the year closed, Willow Bend returned 4.1 percent.
The gut remodel across town returned eleven. Knob-and-tube in the ceiling, a homeowner who moved the island twice, three trips back for a dimmer that hummed. That one made money.
Nobody on the Willow Bend crew did anything wrong. The money left in four specific places, and every one of them is countable if you keep the numbers in a shape that lets you count them.
You priced the wire in March and bought it in June
The takeoff for Lot 7 carried $8,400 of wire and cable. That number came off a supplier quote dated March 2: 12-2 romex at $148 a roll, 12-3 at $244, and 4,000 feet of 14-2 at whatever it was that week. You signed the contract March 19. Rough-in on Lot 7 started June 2.
By June 2 the 12-2 was $189 a roll. That is not a catastrophe. It is 28 percent on one item, and copper does that. On one house it was about $1,780. Across four lots it was near $6,900, and it never appeared anywhere as a decision. It arrived as a stack of counter receipts in a truck console and got keyed into the accounting system in July as one figure under Job Materials.
Here is the part that matters. Baseline on that line was $8,400. Actual came in at $10,180. Nothing in between ever moved. If the baseline is locked the day you sign, and the actual rolls up off real transactions instead of getting typed by somebody in August, the gap is a fact with a date on it. You can see it on Lot 7 in time to reprice Lots 8, 9 and 12, or to go back to the builder with a documented escalation and a supplier quote attached. See it in November and it is just a smaller number on a K-1.
A price you bid and a price you paid are two different facts. A job costing system that only stores one of them is a checkbook.
Four identical lots are not four identical lots
Willow Bend was tracked as one job because it was sold as one job. One contract, one builder, one schedule of values. Material went to Willow Bend, labor went to Willow Bend, and at the end you divided by four.
Divide by four and every lot looks the same. Here is what the four actually did on rough-in labor against a 280-hour bid:
- Lot 7 — 268 hours
- Lot 8 — 291 hours
- Lot 9 — 246 hours
- Lot 12 — 344 hours
The average is 287. You bid 280. On the average you were seven hours off across a four-house subdivision, which is a rounding error and a reason to feel good about the crew.
On Lot 12 you were 64 hours off. At a $78 loaded rate that is $4,992, and it happened for a reason anybody on site could have told you in week two. Lot 12 is the walk-out. The geotech came back and the mechanical room moved eleven feet to the interior, which made every home run longer and put the panel on a wall that had to be furred. Nobody hid it. It just never got separated from the other three houses, so it never became a number.
An average is a way of not knowing. Per-lot costing on a four-lot subdivision means four ledgers under one contract, four sets of hours, four material totals, and one comparison you can read in ninety seconds. The builder is going to ask you to bid the next twelve lots in the same subdivision. You want to walk into that with Lot 12 broken out, not buried.
Rough-in and trim are four months apart and one line item
Rough on Lot 7 closed April 24. Trim started August 11. In between came rock, tape, texture, paint, cabinets and floors. Two different crews, one of them hired after the rough was finished.
If rough labor and trim labor sit on the same line, then on August 11 that line reads $14,000 spent of $23,000 and it tells you nothing. You cannot tell whether rough came in under and trim has room, or rough ran hot and trim has none. On Lot 7 rough finished at $12,880 against $14,000 — $1,120 to the good, and it felt like a win. Trim was bid at $9,000 and landed at $11,340, because six can lights got added in the great room back in April and nobody moved the trim number to match the extra devices, extra trim-out time and extra fixtures.
The house netted negative $1,220 on labor. The first anybody knew was the following March.
Split the phases the way the bid is written and the way the work actually happens: temp power, rough-in, trim and devices, service and callbacks. Temp power alone is worth its own line — the pole, the underground, and $200 a month for seven months that nobody remembers to bill. Four phases, each with its own baseline and its own hours, means percent complete on rough is a count and not a feeling, and it means the trim number is still honest in August. The phase structure for electrical work is not complicated. It is just the kind of thing that never gets done unless the ledger does it for you.
The 26.5 hours nobody billed
Nobody loses money on the contract. They lose it on the work that happened because somebody was standing there.
Across the four Willow Bend lots: six added can lights in a great room, a 60-amp subpanel for a shop the owner decided on in week three, two dedicated circuits after the cabinet shop revised the appliance layout, a relocated bath fan, and a service call to reset a GFCI that turned out to be a landscaper cutting a wire. Twenty-six and a half hours at your $96 T&M rate is $2,544. Add $1,140 of material — the subpanel, the #6, the cans — and you are at $3,684 of work that got done, got paid for by you, and never reached pay application 6.
It never reached the pay application because the ticket lived in three places: a text from the super, a note in a foreman's phone, and somebody's memory. By the time the pay app got assembled, the super had moved to another subdivision and the foreman was on a different job. The work was real. The evidence was not.
The fix is unglamorous and it works. The ticket opens in the field, by the person doing the work, the minute the super asks. Who asked, what changed, a photograph of the condition before it gets covered. Hours attach off the crew's clock-in rather than off a recollection of last Thursday. The receipt for the #6 lands on the ticket instead of disappearing into the wire line. And the open ticket sits on the billing screen until somebody either invoices it or writes it off deliberately. Written off on purpose is a business decision. Written off by forgetting is a leak.
Four numbers, not one
Every one of these leaks is the same failure wearing different clothes: a budget that stores one number per line when the job has four.
- Baseline — what you bid, locked at kickoff, never edited.
- Current — the live plan, with every change logged with who, when and why.
- Committed — approved and ordered, not yet paid.
- Actual — rolled up from real transactions, never typed by hand.
Committed is the one most shops do not have, and it is the one that changes the picture fastest. The Lot 7 panel, breakers and meter were ordered March 4 on a twelve-week lead: $7,150 committed, $0 actual. On a budget that shows only actuals, that line looks like underspending. It is not underspending. It is money with a delivery date. It is the difference between a job that reads 60 percent spent and a job that is 82 percent obligated. Put Committed in its own column and the panel stops being a surprise in month four.
Actual has to come from transactions, not from a keyboard. The journeyman photographs the supply house receipt at the counter, the line items get read off the paper and posted to wire, devices or fixtures, and the ledger is current before the truck leaves the lot. Nobody reconstructs June in July.
Run this on your last four-lot job
You do not need software to do the arithmetic once. Pull the last repeat-plan subdivision you finished and write down five things: the wire quote date and the first purchase date, rough hours per lot, trim hours per lot, every extra ticket you can still remember, and every piece of gear that was ordered more than eight weeks before it shipped.
If the wire gap is under two percent and the hours are within twenty of each other lot to lot, you are running a tight shop and the money went somewhere else. If Lot 12 is sixty hours off and you did not know until now, you have found your eleven percent. It was there the whole time. It just was not on a line by itself.