Reason Why #1: Your WIP Schedule Shouldn't Take a Week
The report your surety trusts most is the one most GCs build by hand from three systems. In SCPM Project, the WIP schedule is one click, computed live from the same ledger that runs the jobs.
By Ed Warmoth, Founder of Conquest Consultants
Ask a controller what the worst week of the quarter is, and most will give the same answer: WIP week. Exports from the project system. Exports from accounting. A spreadsheet built by someone who left years ago. A percent complete that has to be argued out with each PM. Then the numbers go to the surety, the bank, and the CPA, and everyone hopes they tie together.
That's one of the first reasons contractors move to SCPM Project: the WIP schedule stops being a project and becomes a report.
Why it takes a week today
WIP is hard because its inputs live in different places. Contract value and change orders sit in the project system. Costs to date sit in accounting. Estimated cost at completion lives in a PM's head or a side spreadsheet. Billings live in a third file. Every WIP is a reconciliation job before it's a report, and every reconciliation is a chance for a number to be wrong in front of the people who decide your bonding line.
Why it takes one click in SCPM Project
In SCPM Project, those inputs were never separated. The contract, the approved change orders, the committed costs, the posted bills, and the pay applications all live on one cost-code spine, posted to one append-only ledger. So the WIP schedule is computed, not assembled: cost-to-cost percent complete per ASC 606, earned revenue, billed to date, and over- and underbillings, presented gross the way your surety expects them.
There are two modes, because there are two jobs to do. Live WIP is the working estimate your team uses on a Tuesday to make decisions. Definitive WIP is produced by the system at period close, and it's the only version authorized for your bonding company, your bank, or your CPA. The screen labels which one you're looking at, so nobody sends the wrong one.
And when a number raises a question, you don't hunt through spreadsheets for the answer. Every figure drills down to the postings behind it.
What that's worth
A controller gets a week back every quarter. A PM stops defending a percent complete from memory. The owner walks into the surety meeting with a WIP that ties to the financial statements, and the reconciliation checks on those statements say so on their face. The bonding conversation changes when your numbers are never in doubt.
The WIP schedule your surety reads should come out of running your jobs, not be a second job.
This is Reason Why #1 in a ten-part series on why contractors are moving their whole operation onto one platform. Watch the WIP schedule, and the accounting engine behind it, in the four-minute tour on the SCPM Project homepage, then start a free 14-day demo – no pressure from a salesperson. https://scpmproject.com
Structure defeats chaos.
If margin is leaking through the gaps in your operation, a direct conversation is where it starts.