Few concrete contractors know how to track job costs effectively. Very few. The reason few do is very simple: job costing is extremely difficult to get right. Would you like to learn how to do it right? Then read on.

In my many years of helping contractors with their job costing, I have discovered that over 80 percent of them are aiming for the wrong target. Most focus their attention on whether each job made money, and why not? Accounting systems are designed to do that very thing.

Ask your bookkeeper to pull up the charges for a job and he or she will pop out a little job costing report that details the payroll charges and supplier charges (concrete, rock, trucking, etc.) that have been assigned to the job.

What's wrong with that report? Number one, you're not seeing the full costs associated with the job. Number two, the costs of a specific job are nowhere near as important as knowing your crew's average performance across all jobs. As long as your job costing system tracks dollars and only dollars you will never collect the information you need to:

• Estimate accurately
• Consistently finish jobs on time
• Know whether your crews are working as fast as they should

Would you like a quick tip to help you boost the usefulness of your job costing system? Change your mind set from job costing to job tracking. You need to track all of the important information produced by the job. Most of that data is not financial, so you need to concentrate on building a system that tracks critical job information.

Few pieces of information have greater value than knowing the speed at which your crews work - how many cubic yards do your crews install per man-hour? Having that knowledge is like having money in the bank. And the only way you get that knowledge is by installing a job costing system that tracks non-financial numbers.