How to track plant / equipment costs live to project budgets?

A lot of our customers and clients will ask us ‘how can I track my equipment or plant that I own against project costs?’ So, maybe the piece of plant has been purchased as an asset belonging to the company, and we want to be able to account for that against the project budgets. We get a true reading of exactly how much we’re making on these projects.

The first thing we are going to do is we are going to create a database. And in this database, under equipment, we are going to list out all the equipment that we own.

For example, I’ve got a digger here. I can have this broken down by manufacturer, by model, what’s in repair, what’s broken, ownership type, all the different data points that gives us, first of all, a database.

The second thing I’m going to do is I’m going to deploy a cost to this. So, we can calculate the true cost of what it actually costs us to own this piece of plant or equipment.

And it’s going to arrive at an hourly rate of what I can actually now understand how much it truly costs us to own that. So, when we deploy this to the project, we can now get an accurate reading of what it’s actually costing us to have that piece of plant on that project. And it’s very simple how we do that.

First of all, we set up the rate. Second under time, we track employees, obviously, because that’s timesheets. But we can also track equipment. And equipment then just carries the same timesheet.

So, we can have this tracking against the project daily, have a tracking against the project weekly, or we can do bulk entries and say, well actually, that digger which has a rate attached to it was on that project for three weeks at a time.

And we can deploy it in that sense as well. Either way, we’re getting a true reading of any plant and equipment costs on a daily basis going in against that project so we can clearly understand exactly how much we are making on these projects.

If you’d like to see how we can track your plant equipment costs against your project budgets, please feel free to visit LiveCosts.com. Take a free trial or a product tour.