Successfully managing construction projects is highly dependent on the quality of the data that’s captured about those projects. Whether you’re using the data to manage costs, bill your clients, pay your subcontractors, determine progress – or all that and more – the quality of that data is crucial to the success of the project. Current, Accurate and Complete – these are the key cornerstones of quality information. What’s more, getting quality data right from the start – i.e. from when it’s first entered into the system – saves organizations tremendous time, money and effort in executing on projects. Not only that, it reduces the chances and effects of any potential claims, disputes, safety issues and delays.  Mistakes and omissions bleed energy and money from your organization. The result is not just costly, it’s often embarrassing – and you are particularly vulnerable if you have any manual “double-entry” of data from system to system.

If you are hiring subcontractors to work on your projects, you likely want to keep track of how they are performing for you.  Being able to objectively measure subcontractor performance is critical for project managers, so that they can make key decisions to keep their projects running smoothly. However, subcontractor performance management is difficult if you don’t have the right tools in place to measure productivity.

Even the most organized and planned projects can have ad-hoc purchases that happen at the jobsite. In an ideal world, all vendor expenses would be controlled by issued purchase orders driven by a project budget. Vendor expenses should be recorded as an incurred cost against the original purchase order so that you know all of your budgeted costs upfront and you have full clarity around your accruals.

In reality, a project can have a substantial number of non-purchase order vendor expenses that need to be recorded and accounted for on a project. The right vendor management tools can provide you with full visibility into vendor accruals so that you have accurate project cost tracking.

Businesses suffocating from internal systems they've grown out of should have a close look at what it's costing them to delay improving things.

The Pain of Same vs. The Pain of Change

The challenge with any construction project budget that doesn’t utilize the advantages of time-phasing, is that the project manager won’t know exactly when money is anticipated to be spent on the project. And neither will the CFO.