Job Costing Merrill WI

There's a debate currently raging surrounding the relative merits of time and materials billing vs. fixed-price contracts.

In most respects, I think it's no contest: Fixed pricing wins hands down for lots of reasons. It holds the potential for higher margins. It provides a strong incentive to clients and remodelers alike to buy right. And it keeps clients' prying eyes away from parts of the business, like markup, that they wouldn't understand anyway.

There's a dark side to fixed-price contracts, however, and it has to do with what is perceived to be another advantage: Fixed-price contracts are easy to administrate.

What turns this advantage into a liability? Most remodelers working with fixed-price contracts pay attention to costs just long enough to price and sell the job. After that, they can apply for scheduled draws or so-called progress payments without ever taking another look at how the actual costs of construction squares with their estimate.

Unfortunately, profit depends not just on what you sell the job for but on how much you spend to produce it. T&M contracts won't solve this problem — they're too open-ended — but cost-plus contracts just might. They may be time-consuming to administrate, but so is job costing. That's why most remodelers either don't do it or wait until long after the job is over to find out whether or not they made any money.

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