Ask a field business where its margin goes and you'll hear about materials prices and labour rates. Ask where it leaks, and the honest answer is quieter: it leaks between the job site and the invoice.
Where the money actually goes missing
- Billing evidence is scattered, so invoicing waits on the crew to remember and report.
- Materials and time used on site are never fully captured, so jobs quietly under-bill.
- Disputed invoices can't be defended without days of digging.
- There's no live view of cost-to-complete versus budget on the jobs still running.
Every one of these traces back to the same root cause: the cost of a job is recorded after the job, from memory, by people whose actual job is the work — not the accounting.
And it is not a rounding error. A survey of nearly 600 construction firms by PlanGrid and FMI put the cost of non-optimal work — fixing mistakes, hunting for information, resolving conflict — at US$177.5 billion a year in the United States alone, with rework driven by bad or inaccessible information costing US$31 billion in a single year. Nearly a quarter of that rework (22%) traced straight back to poor project data — the record that was never captured cleanly in the first place.
Capture the cost where it happens
The fix isn't a better spreadsheet at month-end. It's capturing labour, plant and materials against each job step as the work happens — so the cost record is built in the field, by the people who were there, at the moment they'd actually know.
| Pain | With FieldTaskora |
|---|---|
| Slow, incomplete invoicing | Labour + plant + materials captured against each job step, live |
| Under-billing | Nothing used on site goes unrecorded |
| Disputed invoices | Drawing-linked, time-stamped evidence backs every line |
| No cost visibility | Real-time job costing vs. budget, per job |
The part that compounds
Here's what makes this more than a billing tweak: the same capture that speeds invoicing also builds the audit trail, the safety record and the client proof. One field action, four business outcomes — and no extra admin headcount to make it happen.
How much are your jobs under-billing because what happened on site never made it onto the invoice?
Sources
- PlanGrid & FMI, “Construction Disconnected” (2018) — US$177.5bn/year in non-optimal labour; US$31bn rework; 22% of rework from poor project data.