The Setup
A commercial general contractor in the Mid-Atlantic region. $15M in annual revenue, 60+ employees across field crews and office staff. They ran 8-12 active jobs at any given time — tenant buildouts, ground-up retail, light industrial renovations — ranging from $200K to $2.5M per project.
The company had recently migrated from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online. Their bookkeeper entered invoices and allocated expenses to job codes manually. The project managers tracked budgets in Excel spreadsheets that they updated when they remembered to — which was usually when someone asked.
The Problem
Job cost tracking was retroactive. The company's process for understanding project profitability worked like this: a job would run for 4-8 months. During that time, invoices from subcontractors and material suppliers flowed in and were paid. At project close-out, the bookkeeper would reconcile all expenses against the original budget. That's when they'd discover the job had gone over budget.
Three specific failures were costing the company money:
- Overruns weren't caught until close-out. A typical job took 6 months. The budget reconciliation happened 30-60 days after the last invoice was paid. By the time an overrun was identified, it was 7-8 months too late to do anything about it. Change orders that should have been filed weren't. Scope additions that should have been billed back to the owner were absorbed.
- Subcontractor invoice creep went undetected. Subcontractors would submit invoices that gradually exceeded their contracted amounts. A $45K electrical sub contract would come in at $48K through a series of invoices that each looked reasonable individually. With 15-20 subs per job and 8-12 active jobs, nobody was cross-referencing every invoice against every contract line by line.
- No cash flow visibility across jobs. The owner knew how much cash was in the bank. He did not know how much of that cash was committed to open purchase orders, pending sub payments, or upcoming material deliveries across all active projects. Cash that looked available was actually spoken for — leading to delayed vendor payments and strained relationships.
What CentSight Did
The team connected CentSight to their QuickBooks Online account. CentSight mapped the company's chart of accounts structure — which used job codes for project-level tracking — and built a real-time cost monitoring system on top of existing data.
- Per-job expense monitoring with deviation alerts: For each active job, CentSight tracked actual costs against the budgeted amount by category (labor, materials, subcontractors, equipment, overhead). When any category exceeded a configurable threshold — the company set it at 10% — the project manager and controller received an alert. Not at close-out. The same week the expense hit the books.
- Subcontractor invoice tracking: CentSight matched incoming sub invoices against contracted amounts and flagged when cumulative billings exceeded the contract value. It also flagged when a sub's billing pattern deviated from the expected draw schedule — a leading indicator of scope creep or unauthorized work.
- Weekly cash flow projections per project: CentSight built a rolling 8-week cash forecast for each active job, factoring in known payables, expected draw requests, and historical payment patterns. The owner could see, for the first time, how much cash was truly available vs. committed across the entire project portfolio.
The Results
In the first 12 months after connecting CentSight:
- $210K in overruns caught and corrected. CentSight flagged 23 budget deviation alerts across 11 jobs. Of those, 17 were legitimate overruns that the team was able to address: 9 resulted in change orders billed back to the project owner, 5 were corrected by switching to alternative materials or approaches, and 3 led to renegotiated sub contracts. Combined value: $210K that would have previously been discovered at close-out and absorbed as lost margin.
- Average overrun detection time: 4 days. Previously, overruns were discovered 30-60 days after project completion — meaning 7-8 months after they began. CentSight reduced detection to an average of 4 days from when the triggering expense was booked. That window was the difference between filing a change order and eating the cost.
- 14 subcontractor invoice discrepancies flagged, $38K recovered. CentSight caught 14 instances where sub invoices exceeded contracted amounts. In 11 cases, the sub had billed for work outside the original scope without a signed change order. In 3 cases, duplicate line items had been included. The controller resolved all 14 before payment was issued.
- Cash flow visibility across all jobs for the first time. The owner described it as “the single most useful thing we've done in five years.” Before CentSight, he'd look at the bank balance and make gut calls about whether to approve material purchases. Now he could see exactly how much cash was committed, when the next draws would hit, and which jobs were generating cash vs. consuming it. The company hasn't missed a vendor payment since.
Why It Worked
The construction industry runs on thin margins — typically 3-8% net on commercial work. A $15M contractor operating at 5% net margin makes $750K. A $210K overrun that goes undetected wipes out 28% of annual profit. CentSight didn't change how the company estimated jobs or managed projects. It changed when they found out something was wrong — from months too late to days. That timing shift, applied across 8-12 concurrent jobs, was worth $210K in the first year and established a cost control baseline the company had never had.