In this episode, Marc Visent from Knowify talks about the importance of job costing for construction and contracting businesses, and the right tools to do it well.
Learn more about Knowify and other QuickBooks Solution Providers specializing in Construction visit QSP Directory (quickbookspartnersolutions.com)
In this episode, Marc Visent from Knowify talks about the importance of job costing for construction and contracting businesses, and the right tools to do it well.
Learn more about Knowify and other QuickBooks Solution Providers specializing in Construction visit QSP Directory (quickbookspartnersolutions.com)
Are you in the construction or contracting business and looking for ways to save time and money? Welcome to the Constructing Growth podcast. My name is Nate Flake and I'm here to help you discover ways to streamline your back office,
automate your workflows, and find the right tools to help you set up your business for growth. All right,
welcome back to another episode of the Constructing Growth podcast. The podcast that's all about helping construction construction companies thrive. I'm your host, Nate Flake, and today we are speaking with the owner and co -founder of Knowify,
Mark Vincent. Really appreciate you being here, Mark. Nate, I'm excited to be here and chat with you today. Yeah, this will be a fun one. So, Knowify is also a QuickBooks solution provider partner, and today we're going to chat about an issue construction companies know all too well,
the importance of accurate job costing. So, for you in the construction industry... you're well aware that every project is unique and costs can quickly spiral out of control if you're not careful.
So that's where accurate job costing comes into play. Let's start by helping our listeners understand what job costing is. Job costing is just a practice of tracking costs,
locating them to the right project. So they're like kind of like these two parts. You know, there are all these costs that could be like purchasing materials. allocating labor, it could be equipment,
it could be pulling permits, it could be anything that goes into the project production. And that is understanding which of these costs go into which project. It combines both. So why is that so crucial?
Why is accurate job costing important for these construction companies? It's mostly about profitability. I think that many construction companies do a good job at tracking revenue. but very few do a good job at tracking costs,
especially project costs. Think about being a project -based business where you only know your revenue, but you don't really understand your cost structure at the project level. You cannot answer the fundamental question of how much money I'm making per project.
That was our very first customers on OIFI. They would come to us and tell us, "I ran 20, 25, 30 projects a year. I cannot tell you how much money I made in project A versus project B." And that's a big problem in this industry.
Yeah. So they're probably just looking at the end of the year and saying, "Hey, I made this much, but if you'd asked me to break it down per project, there's no way." They're just hoping that it works out. And I think that hope is not a strategy.
I think that you can do it until the end of the year for the accountant or the bookkeeper to show up and tell you, "Nate, we did not make money." That's not the right way. You are just improvising. I tell you, if you want to run a growing field,
efficient, you know, like stable business, you have to understand your cost structure. Yeah, that makes sense. So, besides just the bottom line, though, I'm assuming that, you know, this also probably helps with decision making,
estimating future projects, can you speak a little bit to that? I mean, my mind job cost, it will help you today and tomorrow, right? It helped you today because you understand what's going on today in your projects, you know, in real time,
if you really set up a process where you collect costs. you allocate them efficiently to projects, I can tell you today, before going to sleep, I can check my numbers and see today was a good day.
We're on track. We're on track on all these budgets. We are hitting the right numbers, revenues here, costs are here. It's about today, but also about tomorrow. When the project finishes, you can tell these projects for these clients,
they are worth doing versus others that you might want to avoid in the future. The same happens when you work with subcontractors or other vendors. You might identify that some of those are not as good for you as you thought. The only way of knowing that is understanding your cost structure again.
So the big question mark is how do you actually achieve accurate job costing? It's one thing to talk about and the benefits, but you've dealt with thousands of clients in this business,
in this space. What's the secret sauce? How do you achieve accurate job costing? Some people think it's kind of like an art, but they actually believe it's a science. I think that you have to use the right products, and you have to get the right help for that.
Products could be, I am biased, but putting together QuickBooks and Noify, and tracking costs at the project level, using all the QuickBooks tools that you get to track all those costs and then allocating them to the right place with Noify.
But it's not just the tools, it's also the people that are helping you. You can think about using consultants, using account, and you keep using system integrators to come up with the right structure to collect those costs.
Where is the right process? Job costing is not just the job of the accountant or the business owner. It's everyone's job at the business. You can actually come up with a process that will help everybody contribute to the overall goal of tracking costs accurately.
Like you say, it's a science, right? In your experience, do you have any examples of companies that came to you? that either had like, you know, hey, we're in a bad situation or we have no idea what we're doing and kind of talk about that journey and what that would look like for our listeners?
- I think that one classic example that I always remember from our early customers was when we were, you know, when we were seeing all these contractors that they were just tracking certain costs, you know, and they were telling me like,
well, I spent like six hours in the building department pulling a permit. And I would ask them, did you look at it? this cost to the project? And they would be like, well, not really, it's my time, right? But your time is money,
right? You see, you are the most valuable resource in the company. You are the business owner. You are spending six hours at the building department pulling a permit. Soon you will find out that that's not the best usage of your time,
right? You might actually want to outsource that part of your business. You might actually rely on someone else to pull the permit for you. Those are the type of things that you will discover. But then-- And those are the classic examples that some of these contacts would be like,
"Dah, you're right." I'd be like, "Why did I never think I thought about that?" You never thought about that because you never thought about the cost side of the business or the project, right? You were always thinking about the revenue side. I think that-- - Yeah, that's six hours that you're not on the job putting in drywall or framing.
- Or selling more projects to new customers, right? I think that it's sometimes the fact that, I think that for most construction companies, companies relatively easy to allocate materials and labor, they cannot like, no,
this goes into the project. But there are all these other many things that happen on the project that you are not accounting for. And, you know, those are eating your margins. And at the end of the day, when you're trying to make decisions about projects, you have to be accurate.
Putting you on the spot here a little bit, what are like two or three of the top things people don't think about when it comes to job costing? Like, yeah, you mentioned materials. Of course, that's one of them. I think that's one of the top things people don't think about when it comes to job costing.
one of the interesting things about job costing is when you when you compare like actuals versus committed costs, you know, like some people will forget that there is an invoice coming in from that subcontractor that they never counted for.
They never counted for because they didn't enter a purchase order for that subcontractor and allocated it to the project, right? So it's a surprise when three months later they receive an invoice for $15 ,000 and they realize wait a second.
I didn't make that much money in that project, because now I have to pay this invoice, right? So that's a classical, but look what, it's like the timing of your costs. Another one classic one would be what I mentioned before about all that time that is not direct time to the project.
It's not me working on this electric panel or me on the roof, working on shingles. But it's more about the time that goes around the project.
you know, and what if I am spending six hours, not only at the building department, but also like with a certain customer, I am not spending other hours with our customers, right? That has to be allocated for. I see that that's kind of like an interesting piece that usually people tend to overlook.
Yeah, they probably don't think about it. So what would you say to those in the construction industry and those listening that would argue you that everything we just covered when it comes to tracking.
tracking job costing sounds like way too much work. I would tell them that it is work, but it's work worth doing. That's the reality. I think that think about how you want your business to grow.
Think about how stable you want it to be. Think about the value that you're adding to the business, how the business is growing. I think that it's more about you spending the right time to create the right distraction and creating the right distraction is not just about the revenue,
it's also about the cost, right? And I think that you're going to think, why didn't I start before? You know, like, why didn't I do it sooner? We see it with our customers. If for them, it's transformational when they get into this rhythm of like actually tracking costs properly and locating them to their projects.
Yeah, probably allows them to grow too, right? Not to make a building pun, but like, I mean, you're building a foundation. And if you can't build a proper foundation, you're not going to be able to do that. to build much of a house on that, right? Growth usually comes from you taking more projects.
How can you take more projects if you don't really know how much you're spending in each project? You're literally just guessing. And guessing works until it doesn't. And I think that that's a classic case. Most of the construction companies usually know,
if I, they would define themselves as like growing construction companies, right? They are growing because they are scaling up, they're taking more projects. You can only do that if you combine something like QuickBooks and notify and you'll really understand what's going on at the cost level for each project.
Yeah, fully seeing into each level of each project. Well, I love that, Mark. Thanks so much for these tips. It's been great. So, accurate job costing obviously is clearly important to growing your construction business and driving success in this industry.
Thanks so much for tuning in to the Constructing Growth podcast. As always, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends. fellow builders to learn more about Noify or chat with Mark or any other QuickBooks solution provider that has been on the podcast.
You can go to quickbookspartnersolutions .com and get in contact with them. Mark, really appreciate you kind of breaking that down for us. Thanks so much for joining us, a guest.
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