Accordia - project margin visibility
That project you closed out last month
are you sure it made money?
A vendor bill is still in someone's email. A supplier's credit-card charge that could be this project or the next, and nobody checked. The labor hours are in a text message, or half-entered in a spreadsheet no one finished.
The margin you priced your last bid from was built from whatever had landed by the time you looked. You already know some of it was missing.
One project
You get a number. You're not sure it's right. You never have been.
Sunday afternoon, Project 847. You pull the invoice from QuickBooks, search BILL for the vendor bills you think belong to it, dig through a folder for the material receipts, call a crew lead about the hours. A supplier's card charge might be 847. Might be 852. A bill posted after you'd moved on. Another bill, the one that should have been invoiced in February, shows up in May.
Monday's coming. You have a bid to write, and you price it from gut, because the real margin from the last similar project isn't something you can pull up. It's something you'd have to rebuild. So you don't.
The projects that cost you aren't the ones you'd guess. They're the ones that looked profitable because the final costs hadn't arrived when you looked.
What you can't see right now
The evidence keeps arriving after the decisions that needed it.
A week late. A month late. Three months late. Every time, the margin you acted on was incomplete. You just didn't know which part was missing.
The project that looked profitable? Now you can see what was missing, before you price the next one from it. The loss-makers, at the gross-margin level. The customers and projects that consistently earn the best margins, and the ones that only looked good because the costs were still arriving.
From your QuickBooks revenue, your BILL vendor costs, and the records you already keep. Not a reconstruction. Not a new system. If something is missing from the number, the number says so.
How it works
Connect your books and your bills. The references already on your records do the matching.
Connect QuickBooks Online and BILL; the costs that don't run through BILL, you upload. Your revenue and costs are read, not written, not changed, and linked to each project by the purchase-order or job reference already on them.
A bill that could go to this project or the next is flagged, not guessed. A cost with no reference is separated, not buried. The vendor bill that shows up three months late links to the project when it arrives, and the number updates. No data entry. No new workflow.
Three things that change
You already suspect some of these are wrong
The one that should keep you up isn't the obviously bad margin. It's the one that looks fine, and is just incomplete.
That number lives in someone's head
If they leave, it leaves with them. The references on your records do the linking, so it doesn't depend on anyone remembering.
Every bid carries the margin from the last one
Was the number you priced from finished, or were costs still landing when you used it?
What stays the same
Nothing moves. Nothing changes. Your accountant stays your accountant.
Your QuickBooks, your BILL account, the spreadsheets, the folders, the way your team tracks hours. Nothing is written back to your books. The evidence stays where it is, and for the first time, the picture that lives across all of it is shown to you. Honestly. Including the parts that are still missing.