Case Study
Commercial Visibility System
Empowering owner-managed contractors with real-time job costing and data-driven fore-sight to secure long-term profitability.
System in Action
The Problem
DCE was managing a high volume of live jobs, but there was no single system connecting the commercial side of each one. Expenses were tracked and invoices raised and paid as normal, but none of that data linked back to what a job had actually been forecast to cost — so margin wasn't visible while a job was still running, especially on the larger, longer projects where additional work and contract variations kept shifting the numbers throughout. With so many jobs in motion, it became difficult to know exactly how many were live versus complete, what overall profitability looked like at any given time, or to get a clear, up-to-date view of cash flow and invoicing across the business.
The Approach
A bespoke commercial system built for DCE — a live job register, job-by-job costing that tracks forecast against actual as the work progresses, and a clear dashboard showing margin and cash position at a glance. It updates itself with minimal extra admin, and even generates its own job numbers — replacing a subscription DCE no longer needs.
The Outcome
The system gives DCE a single, central job register showing every job's key commercials at a glance — how many are live, how many are complete, and where each one stands.
Starting a new job takes one step: it automatically creates a unique job number and sets up the costing template behind it, so nothing needs setting up twice. From there, each job tracks forecasted key costs — labour and materials — against what's actually being spent, and a dashboard shows forecasted versus actual gross margin, in both £ and %, for any individual job or across the business as a whole.
Invoicing works the same way — a live view of what's been sent, what's outstanding, and what needs chasing, so nothing gets missed. Nothing is entered twice anywhere in the system, keeping the day-to-day as close as possible to how DCE worked before — just with the numbers now connected and visible the whole way through.