How To Track Construction Labour Costs At The Project Level

Tracking labour costs at phase level can be a problem when it comes to us getting an accurate reading of exactly how much our labour, whether it be direct or subcontract, is actually costing us on the project.

The reason we’ve underline “at phase level” is because a lot of us will be maybe using direct labour tracking apps.

There’s a lot of these on the market and they’re very good.

Let me start with this: Anything that reduces the time we spend inputting data into any system is saving the company time and as a result of that is saving the company money.

So we’re all for that.

But the issue it creates is that it doesn’t get us into the devil of the detail.

So, for example, when we set up our project and we have detail on the project, such as the project name, the total budget, and we then want to break that budget down to sharpen up our estimate or to create milestones, so we can see that we’re hitting milestones as we progress through the project.

If the labour is coming in as a bulk sum just at project level, we’re not getting a direct reading or we have to second hand the labour and the start to break it up into that phase level.

What we need is a simple way to take these timesheets and split them up.

Now they can come directly through a mobile app. That’s absolutely fine.

They can be a duplicate of timesheets. That’s absolutely fine.

But what we need to be able to do is to look at not just the project level on a timesheet, but also the phase level. And the result of that is when we start to collect time, we can then spin that time in.

We can break the time down, not just at project level, total project labour, but also break it down into the phase level.

So we can start a drill into the phases, split the phases up and get a true reading then at phase level, exactly how my labour is impacting the project as we work through the project.

If you’d like to see how we can drill into your labour and break that labour down at phase level, feel free to take a Free Trial or a Product Tour.