Read Your Job's Real Profit, Live: Forecast Cost to Complete in Wunderbuild

Most builders find out whether a job made money after it is finished, when it is far too late to do anything about it. The whole point of running your jobs in Wunderbuild is to know your real margin while the job is still live. The tool that does it is Forecast Cost to Complete, and it is one of the most underused features I see.

How it works

Forecast Cost to Complete pulls three things together for every category on your job:

• Actuals: what you have actually spent so far.
• Committed: your purchase orders, the costs you have locked in.
• Forecast: what you expect the rest to cost, for anything not yet committed.

Put those together and your gross margin updates live as the job runs. You are not waiting for the accountant. You can see today whether you are ahead or behind.

Committed versus complete

Two little buttons do a lot of the work here, and it is worth being clear on the difference:

• Mark committed tells the system to use your forecast amount for that category. You do this when a trade’s quote is accepted and the scope is locked in for the job. From that point the system trusts the committed number, not just what has been spent so far.
• Mark complete locks the category using actuals only, because the work is done and no further spend is expected.

As you commit and complete categories through the build, your forecast gets tighter and your margin number gets more honest.

The labour trick that shows your real profit

Here is a tip that changes how the numbers read. When you enter a committed cost for your own labour, enter it at your actual cost rate, say seventy dollars an hour, even if you budgeted that work at your charge-out rate of a hundred. The difference between the two flows straight through to profit, where you can see it. You get a true picture of the margin you are actually making, not the one you hoped for when you quoted.

Work at line-item level rather than just category level and you can go further, marking individual items complete and releasing those savings to profit one at a time.

Make it a weekly habit

None of this works if you touch it once a quarter. The builders who get value from it treat it as a weekly hygiene job. Mark things committed as quotes come in, mark categories complete as they finish, and keep the forecast current. A lot of good operators do a full review at the end of each month, then read their work in progress the next morning with fresh eyes.

For a quick weekly health check you do not need every column. Category, budgeted, incurred, committed and total is plenty to see at a glance whether a job is tracking. Keep the view simple and your project managers will actually use it.

Why it matters

A live margin number changes your behaviour. You catch an overrun in week six instead of at handover. You have the open-book conversation with a client while there is still room to move. And you walk into every job review knowing exactly where you stand.

This is the kind of discipline we work through with builders inside Future Builder, because the software only pays off when you use it to actually run the numbers.

Cheers Luke