A report worth reading has three things a scoreboard does not. The gap line by line, what could not be attached, and what nobody checked.
Written by JD Davenport, who still sells for a living. Updated 4 November 2026.
Most job cost reports show what the job was sold for, what it cost, and the difference. That is a scoreboard. It tells you the result and nothing about what produced it, which means you can read one every week for a year and change nothing.
Contract value. Cost by code. Gross profit in dollars and in percent. Keep it, it is the top of the page.
One rule about it. Every figure carries the date it was last updated, because a job cost report read before the late invoices land is a different document from the same report read a month later, and nothing on the page usually says which one you are holding.
Estimated against actual, by line. Not totals. A job that came in $800 over tells you the size of the hole. A job that came in $800 over because disposal was never estimated and labor ran $300 under tells you what to fix. One of those is information and the other is a feeling.
Unattached cost. Money that left the business in the window and could not be tied to a job. Most reports have nowhere to put this, so it either gets forced onto a job that did not cause it or silently dropped. Both make the report worse than nothing, because it looks complete.
Give it a line. A number there is not a failure, it is a measurement, and watching it shrink is how you know the system is improving.
Verified against unverified. Which costs have a document somebody actually looked at. Missing paperwork is not fraud and plenty of subs invoice by text message. But a payment nobody has checked has to look different from one somebody checked and passed, or every row carries the same confidence and none of it is earned.
Leaf level, underneath the summary. A total is not evidence. If you cannot see the line items you cannot test them, and a summary that agrees with itself tells you nothing about whether it agrees with reality.
The summary is for reading. The rows are for finding the error, and you will not find it in the summary because the summary is where it is hiding.
Which jobs finished under your floor, named rather than counted.
Whether the shortfall is concentrated or spread. Sort worst-first and look at the bottom ten. Concentrated means execution on specific jobs. Spread means pricing. Those are different problems with different owners, and the average hides which one you have.
Which lines keep coming up short across jobs. That is the estimating defect, and it only appears when you compare across jobs rather than within one.
Overhead allocated to jobs. It makes every job look worse by an amount nobody can argue about and tells you nothing about which work to sell more of. Keep overhead at the business level where it belongs.
And anything you cannot source. A line nobody can trace to a document will be the line somebody challenges, and the whole report gets discounted on the strength of it.
The report format, the twelve tests that fill the verified column, and the workbook are The Job Cost Standard. More answers on the questions page.