Live labor and material burn vs PO budget, by job, refreshed every morning before the owner pours coffee. Color-coded so the red row is seen before his second sip of coffee. This is the same dashboard pattern running on a Mid-Michigan GC’s ops floor right now. From $18,000.
Walk into the Wednesday morning ops meeting at a typical 30-person GC in Midland. The owner asks the project manager “how are we on the Saginaw townhomes?” The PM says “we’re good.” The PM doesn’t actually know. Nobody knows. The labor hours from Workyard haven’t been pulled into the job cost spreadsheet since last Thursday. The material POs are scattered between three suppliers and the office manager hasn’t keyed them into the master tracker yet. The job is at 78% labor burn against a 65% schedule completion, which means it’s going to come in $14K over — but no one will know until someone reconciles it next week.
Then the same conversation happens at month-end close. The bookkeeper finally pulls everything together. The Riverside kitchen retrofit landed $22K over PO. The strip mall HVAC job came in $9K under. The owner finds out on the 8th of the next month, three weeks after the work was done. By then it’s not actionable — the GC has already accepted the work, the crew has moved to the next job, and the bid that produced the$22K overrun is six months in the rearview. You can’t fix the loss. You can only learn from it.
The hardest part is that your data already exists. Workyard is tracking every hour. QuickBooks knows every PO. Your project manager is updating completion percentages in the master tracker. Three separate systems hold three pieces of the same truth. The missing piece is the daily reconciliation that puts those three things in front of the owner’s eyes in a way he can act on before the job finishes.
Most Mid-Michigan contractors at the 15-50 employee tier have never had a real burn-rate dashboard. They have a month-end spreadsheet. The difference between those two things is the difference between a 4% net margin and a 9% net margin on the same work. That’s the gap we close.
A 30-person GC running $3.2M revenue, with PM and bookkeeper spending a combined 9 hours a week on manual job-cost reconciliation. Then there’s the cost of the overruns nobody caught in time.
The dashboard pays back the labor in 4 months. The margin recovery on jobs you can actually course-correct mid-flight is where the real money lives. A single $25K overrun caught at 60% completion instead of at completion typically pays for the entire engagement.
The script pulls every clocked hour for the last 24 hours, applies your burden rate plus OT plus per diem rules, and writes one line per active job. Pull is fully automated via GitHub Actions or your scheduler of choice. No more Monday morning ‘wait, did Robert work Saturday?’
Open POs, received POs, partial deliveries, and unbilled commitments all rolled up against the budgeted material line for the job. Catches the overrun where the foreman ordered an extra pallet of conduit without flagging the PM.
Green / yellow / red by burn-vs-completion ratio. Click into any job for the line items, the foreman, the original PO, and the trend over the last 14 days. Mobile-friendly so the owner can check it from the truck.
Three sections: jobs over 90% burn at under 80% completion (red), jobs trending toward overrun (yellow), and the green column for everything else. Owner reads it in 90 seconds before he’s out of the driveway.
We map your time-tracking system, accounting system, PO structure, and budget convention. We pull 30 days of historical data and reconcile manually against your last month-end close to validate the inputs match.
Workyard (or your equivalent) integration. PO pull from accounting. Per-job burn calculation matching your existing cost formula. First test runs against 5 active jobs.
Dashboard published at your team URL. Color thresholds tuned to your appetite (some firms want red at 85% burn vs completion, others at 95%). Daily digest email drafted and approved.
Daily early-morning run wired into a scheduler. Owner-side training is one 30-minute call. The dashboard runs itself. We monitor passively for the 30-day support window.
Essentials ($7,500) is the labor-only burn engine for a single integration (Workyard or T-Sheets). Standard ($18,000) adds material reconciliation, the dashboard, and the digest email — the full operating picture. Turnkey ($42,000) extends to multi-entity consolidation, equipment cost tracking, and equipment depreciation allocation across jobs.
They do parts of it. None of them stitch labor + materials + PO + completion into a single morning view that’s tuned to your specific overrun thresholds. We sit on top of what you already pay for and produce the operating picture none of them produce out of the box.
That’s normal. We document your PO convention in discovery and build to it. T&M jobs with caps, lump sum, unit-priced contracts, and progress-billed AIA jobs all get distinct burn calculations. We don’t force you into a template.
The build runs in parallel against historical data first. Your current month-end process continues uninterrupted. The new dashboard runs in shadow mode for 30 days alongside the old before cutover.
The dashboard runs on your infrastructure (Vercel, GitHub Actions, your storage). Source code, configuration, and runbook are yours. We hand off documentation that an in-house IT person can maintain. We earn the retainer by being useful.
Yes. Essentials ({'$'}7,500) is the labor-only burn engine with the daily digest. It’s a legitimate standalone product. Most clients add material reconciliation within 90 days because the labor view alone reveals the overrun pattern but not the material driver.
It always is. Part of the build is a daily exception report flagging missing punches, suspicious hours (over 14 in a day), and unassigned jobs. The dashboard improves your data quality as a side effect of consuming it.
No. Everything runs on your accounts. Workyard token, QuickBooks token, dashboard URL — all yours. We don’t store labor data, PO data, or job costs on Qintova infrastructure.
That’s the Turnkey-tier extension. Equipment hours from your asset tracker, depreciation allocations from your accounting, and per-job equipment burden. We build it when your business is big enough that equipment cost matters more than equipment availability.
Three-minute assessment. Real margin math. No sales call required.