WIP report

A work-in-progress (WIP) report compares billed-to-date against earned revenue on every active job, surfacing over- or under-billing before it distorts a company's cash position.

A WIP report answers a specific question across every open job at once: are we billing ahead of the work (over-billed) or behind it (under-billed)? It's a standard financial control in construction accounting precisely because job costs and billing rarely move in lockstep.

Pulling one manually means reconciling percent-complete estimates against every pay app across every active job — the kind of task that gets described as needing to be 'semi-automated' because doing it by hand every month doesn't scale past a handful of jobs.

Example

A GC's WIP report shows a $500,000 job at 70% cost-complete but only 55% billed — $75,000 of earned revenue sitting unbilled, which explains a cash crunch that would otherwise look like the company just isn't profitable.

Related terms

Job costingJob costing is tracking actual labor, material, and overhead costs against the estimate for a specific project in real time, so you know whether it's making or losing money before it closes out.Over-billing / under-billingOver-billing means a contractor has invoiced more than the work actually completed justifies; under-billing means completed work sits unbilled — both distort a company's real cash and profit position.Cost codeA cost code is the identifier that categorizes a specific type of cost — a labor hour, a material purchase, a sub invoice — to a standard budget category so it can be tracked and compared across jobs.

Next step

Where this shows up in Datumel:

Job-Costing Workbook InstallFrom $6,000 one-time

A configured job-costing workbook in your own Sheets or Airtable: cost codes, estimate-versus-actual, WIP, and over/under billing, with training to run it.

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