Construction Company KPIs: The 9 Numbers I Would Put on a Live Dashboard

Nine numbers, one row per job, refreshed every night instead of every month: cost to complete, percent complete by cost, the over and under billing position, committed cost not yet invoiced, unapproved change order value and its age, field hours by cost code, days from pay application to cash by general contractor, retainage outstanding by age, and the gross margin sitting inside backlog.

I am Hayat Amin. I spent twenty years as a technology chief financial officer and sold three companies in that seat, so I have closed enough month ends to know exactly what a month end report is: an accurate account of a decision you can no longer make. I now build the systems that produce these numbers live, inside the company, as a forward deployed engineer rather than as an adviser. This piece is about construction because construction is the industry where the lag hurts most. A job is a small business that opens and closes inside a year, and by the time the books close on it the money is already spent.

Why month end is too late in this industry specifically

Every business has a reporting lag. Construction has a reporting lag wrapped around a cash structure that is already hostile.

Siteline surveyed 492 construction finance and operations professionals in May 2026 for its report on the state of subcontractor billing. The headline on its own page is that 92 percent of subcontractors floated payroll last year while waiting to be paid. Contractor Magazine, writing up the same survey, reports that 28 percent did it most months, that 43 percent waited more than 90 days for final payment and retainage against 15 percent of general contractors, that nearly one in five waited six months or more for retainage, that 67 percent spend eleven hours or more every month preparing, submitting and tracking pay applications, and that 56 percent have missed a critical mechanic's lien deadline in the past two years.

Read those together. The company is lending its own payroll to the job, it is spending most of two working days a month assembling the paperwork that gets the money back, and it is missing the legal deadline that protects the money when the paperwork slips. Then, three weeks after the month closes, it receives a report explaining that this happened.

The report is not wrong. It is just an obituary. The nine numbers below are the same information taken while the patient is alive.

How I chose these nine

Three tests, applied to every candidate number, and most of the usual construction KPI lists fail all three.

One: it has to change a decision inside the week. Not inform a decision. Change one. If knowing it on Tuesday and knowing it at month end lead to the same action, it belongs in the annual accounts, not on a dashboard.

Two: it has to be computable from data the company already captures. Every number here is assembled from records that exist somewhere in the business today. None of them requires anyone in the field to fill in something new. A dashboard that depends on new human data entry is dead within six weeks and I have watched it happen.

Three: it has to be wrong by month end. This is the test that does the work. Cash in the bank is a fine number and it does not belong here, because the bank already tells you live. The nine below are the ones that decay, and the decay is the reason nobody sees them.

I have said where each one currently lives, because that is the actual engineering problem. The numbers are not missing. They are in four different products owned by three different people.

1. Cost to complete, by job

What it is. The estimate of what is left to spend to finish the job. Deltek's guide to work in progress describes the mechanic plainly: you add the total amount spent to date to the estimated cost to finish to calculate your revised budget. That revised budget, against the contract value, is the profit on the job.

Where it lives. Half in the accounting ERP and half in a project manager's head. Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate, FOUNDATION by Foundation Software and Vista by Trimble Viewpoint all hold the costs to date, and all of them will print the report. None of them knows that the superintendent walked the site this morning and concluded the drywall is going to take three more weeks.

What changes when it is live. This is the single number that decides whether you bid the next job. A contractor with four jobs running and a stale cost to complete on two of them is bidding blind, and the classic failure in this industry is winning work you cannot afford to staff because the job you are already on is quietly eating the crew.

When it does not matter. Short duration, fixed scope, one crew work. If the job opens and closes inside a fortnight, cost to complete is a rounding error and you should spend the effort on number 7 instead.

2. Percent complete by cost, by job

What it is. Deltek gives the formula: the percentage of work completed is calculated by dividing the actual costs to date by the revised estimated costs. Cost based, not opinion based. The difference between this number and what the project manager says is complete is the earliest honest signal of margin fade there is.

Where it lives. The costs are in the ERP. The judgement of physical progress is in the project management platform, in Procore under Project Management and Financials, or in Sage Construction Management, which Sage's own integration documentation describes as handling preconstruction, procurement, job costing and budgeting while Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate performs, in its words, corporate accounting. Two systems, two versions of complete.

What changes when it is live. You get to see the gap between cost complete and physically complete week by week rather than as a single ugly reveal at the end. When cost complete runs ahead of physical complete for three weeks straight, the estimate was wrong, and three weeks is early enough to renegotiate, resequence or stop.

When it does not matter. Time and materials work with no fixed price exposure. If the customer pays for the hours whatever happens, percent complete is a scheduling question rather than a financial one.

3. The over and under billing position

What it is. Earned revenue against billings to date. Deltek defines overbilling as having charged more than needed for the work completed, and underbilling as billing less than the amount earned for work completed to date. In cash terms, overbilled means the customer is financing you and underbilled means you are financing the customer.

Where it lives. Only in the work in progress schedule, which in most companies is a spreadsheet one person rebuilds by hand every month from ERP exports. That person is usually the controller, and in a company under a hundred people that person is usually also doing four other jobs.

What changes when it is live. Underbilling is the quietest way a profitable contractor runs out of money, because the profit and loss looks fine while the bank account empties. Seen weekly, an underbilled job is a billing instruction. Seen at quarter end, it is a bridging loan.

When it does not matter. If you bill in full on completion and your jobs are short, there is no position to hold. This one is for anyone on progress billing or schedule of values work.

4. Committed cost not yet invoiced

What it is. Purchase orders raised and subcontracts signed, where the bill has not yet arrived. Money that is already spent and that the general ledger has never heard of.

Where it lives. In the commitment records of the project management system. Sage's integration documentation is explicit about the flow: its construction management product posts project budgets and commitments, meaning purchase orders, subcontracts and invoices, across to Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate, and the accounting system sends back contract details, cost reporting and payment information. Between those two posts, the committed cost is real and invisible.

What changes when it is live. Your job cost report stops lying to you. A job showing 60 percent of budget spent, with, say, 300,000 dollars of signed subcontracts still pending, is not at 60 percent, and the person approving the next change order needs to know that before they sign, not after.

When it does not matter. Self performed work with no subcontractors and little purchased material. Rare, but it exists in some specialty trades.

5. Unapproved change order value, and its age

What it is. Work that has been asked for, and in many cases already performed, that nobody has signed. Two numbers, not one: the dollar value, and how many days each item has been sitting unapproved. The age is the more useful half.

Where it lives. In the project management platform. Procore carries change management inside its Project Management and Financials modules. The difficulty is not capture, it is that the value never reaches the person thinking about cash, because it is not yet an invoice and therefore not yet in accounting.

What changes when it is live. Ageing changes behaviour in a way that value alone does not. An owner who sees, on a Tuesday morning, that 140,000 dollars of change orders have been unsigned for over 45 days makes a phone call that same afternoon. The same owner shown a total with no age does nothing, because a total looks like paperwork and an age looks like a problem.

When it does not matter. Never, in my experience, on any job with an owner or a general contractor above you. If you only do design and build work for repeat private clients on a handshake, you have a different exposure and this dashboard will not help with it.

6. Field hours by cost code, today

What it is. Hours logged in the field, coded to the cost code they were estimated against, compared to the estimate for that code. The only number of the nine that moves on the same day the problem starts.

Where it lives. In a field application. Raken, which describes itself as collecting field data on mobile with notes, photos and videos syncing to its web app in real time, does daily reports, flexible time tracking and production tracking against material and equipment use. In the residential and commercial trades, ServiceTitan, which calls itself software for commercial and residential trades and covers HVAC, plumbing, electrical and roofing among others, holds the same data inside its dispatching, invoicing and reporting.

What changes when it is live. Everything upstream. Cost to complete, percent complete and the billing position all derive from labour, and labour is the input that arrives daily and gets summarised weekly at best. A crew burning a cost code at twice the estimated rate is visible on day three if anyone is looking at day three.

When it does not matter. If your field hours are not coded to the estimate, this number is noise and you should fix the coding before you build any dashboard at all. Uncoded hours are the most common reason a contractor dashboard project fails.

7. Days from pay application to cash, by general contractor

What it is. Not average days sales outstanding. Days, per general contractor, from the pay application you submitted to the money arriving. The average hides the offender. The breakdown names them.

Where it lives. Split between the billing process and the bank. Siteline exists as a category because this is nobody's system of record: its 2026 survey found that 67 percent of subcontractors spend eleven hours or more a month preparing, submitting and tracking pay applications, which is what happens when the tracking is manual.

What changes when it is live. You price the customer rather than the job. A general contractor who reliably takes 95 days is not the same customer as one who takes 35, and the difference is a real financing cost that should appear in the next bid. Most contractors know who the slow payers are as a feeling. Very few can put a number on it, and the number is what changes the bid.

When it does not matter. If you work direct for owners on deposit and progress terms you control, this is a collections question and not a dashboard question.

8. Retainage outstanding, by age

What it is. Money already earned and contractually held back, bucketed by how long it has been held. This is the purest form of profit you cannot spend.

Where it lives. In the receivables ledger, where it is usually indistinguishable from ordinary slow payment, which is why it goes unmanaged.

What changes when it is live. The scale becomes arguable. On the Siteline survey as reported by Contractor Magazine, 43 percent of subcontractors wait more than 90 days for final payment and retainage, and nearly one in five wait six months or more. A company holding a six figure retainage balance aged past six months has a financing problem it has been treating as an administrative one, and the first step in fixing it is simply seeing the ageing bucket on a screen next to the payroll number.

When it does not matter. Contracts without retainage. If that is you, skip it, and be aware you are in a minority.

9. Backlog, and the gross margin inside it

What it is. Signed work not yet performed, and the margin you expect to earn on it. Backlog alone is a vanity number. Backlog at margin is a hiring decision.

Where it lives. Nowhere, in most companies. The signed contracts are in the project system, the estimated margins are in the estimating files, and the two have never been added together in one view. Procore carries Bid Management and Financials; Vista by Trimble Viewpoint covers job costing and financial management alongside HR and payroll; FOUNDATION by Foundation Software brings job costing, payroll, invoicing, vendor payments and financial reporting into one system and says it serves more than 43,000 construction professionals. Any of them holds half of this. The other half is in a spreadsheet the estimator owns.

What changes when it is live. The two decisions that actually determine whether a construction company survives a downturn: who you hire, and which work you refuse. Twelve months of backlog at four percent margin is worse than six months at eighteen, and an owner looking at backlog alone cannot tell those apart.

When it does not matter. If you turn work around inside a month and your pipeline is repeat service calls, backlog is not the constraint. Capacity is, and number 6 is your dashboard.

What it actually takes to make these live

This is the part the dashboard vendors skip, so let me be direct about it. Nothing above requires artificial intelligence to compute. It is arithmetic. The reason a construction company does not have these numbers is not intelligence, it is plumbing: the costs are in the ERP, the commitments and change orders are in the project platform, the hours are in a field app, the cash is in the bank, and every one of those systems was bought separately by a different person in a different year.

The work is therefore joining work. Read each system through its interface on a schedule, land the records in one place, agree which system is authoritative for each field, compute the nine, and put them on one screen with one row per job. Sage publishes the shape of exactly this for its own products: budgets and commitments posting one way, contract, cost and payment data coming back the other. When a company runs two products from one vendor, some of that is bought rather than built. When it runs Procore with a different accounting ERP and a separate field time app, which is the common case, somebody has to build it.

Artificial intelligence earns its place afterwards, and in two narrow spots. It reads the unstructured things, the daily report text, the emailed change request, the photograph of a delivery ticket, and turns them into a coded record. Then it watches the nine numbers and tells a human which job moved and why, which is the difference between a dashboard somebody opens and a dashboard somebody ignores. That is what I mean by AI operations: not a chat window bolted to the side of the business, but the joining work plus the watching, owned by somebody accountable for it in production.

The numbers I would leave off

A dashboard earns trust by being short. Four things I have taken off construction dashboards and never missed.

Revenue. On percentage of completion accounting, revenue is an output of the numbers above. Putting it on the screen invites people to manage the output instead of the input.

Safety incident counts as a headline tile. Safety deserves its own review with its own seriousness, and reducing it to a tile beside the cash number teaches everyone to read it as a score. Procore and Raken both carry the underlying safety records properly.

Company wide gross margin. True and useless. Margin is earned or lost per job, and the company number is an average that conceals both the job that is saving you and the job that is killing you.

Anything requiring new manual entry. If a number needs a human to type something they do not already type, it will be accurate for about five weeks.

About Hayat Amin

I am Hayat Amin, and I have spent twenty years in technology, most of it as a chief financial officer inside companies growing faster than their reporting could keep up with. I have sold three companies in that seat, with American Express and TripAdvisor among the buyers, and carried three FT 100 fastest growing listings along the way. That is where my view of month end comes from: I have signed off enough of them to know that the close is an accounting event, not an operating one.

What I am exceptional at is the thing this article describes. Connecting systems that were never designed to talk to each other, and turning what comes out into a real time number a chief executive can run the week on. I do the same work on intellectual property and data assets, valuing and monetising the things a company owns and cannot see on its balance sheet, and I sit beside the founder from the first conversation through to the wire transfer on an exit. I am not an adviser who models this. I build it in your systems, with your credentials, and stay accountable for it until it runs without me, which is what a forward deployed engineer is.

I am available now for fractional chief financial officer work and AI operations work through Beyond Elevation, and the engineering side of it is described at meethayat.com/services/fde.

If you want a second pair of eyes on which of these nine you could have running first, I do a free audit call: one call, then a written list of what to automate first, what it saves and what it costs, at beyondelevation.com/call/hayat.

Questions people actually ask

What is a KPI in construction?

A number that tells you whether a job is winning or losing while you can still do something about it. The useful ones are job level and cost based, not company level and revenue based: cost to complete, percent complete by cost, the over and under billing position, committed cost not yet invoiced, unapproved change order value, field hours by cost code, days from pay application to cash, retainage by age, and the gross margin inside backlog. Anything you cannot act on inside a week is a statistic, not a key performance indicator.

What are the financial KPIs for construction companies?

The work in progress numbers and the cash numbers. Deltek defines percent complete as actual costs to date divided by revised estimated costs, overbilling as having charged more than needed for the work completed, and underbilling as billing less than the amount earned for work completed to date. Around those sit cost to complete, committed cost not yet invoiced, days from pay application submitted to cash received by general contractor, retainage outstanding by age, and gross margin in signed backlog. Field hours by cost code is the leading indicator that moves all of them.

What should a construction KPI dashboard show?

One row per job, one number per question, refreshed daily. Cost to complete and percent complete by cost say whether the estimate still holds. The over and under billing position says whether the customer is financing you or you are financing the customer. Committed cost not yet invoiced says what is coming that the ledger has not seen. Unapproved change order value and its age says how much finished work nobody has signed for. Field hours by cost code is the one that moves on the day the problem starts, which is why it belongs at the top.

What are some construction KPI examples?

Cost to complete by job. Percent complete by cost, being actual costs to date over revised estimated cost. Over or under billed, being earned revenue less billings to date. Committed cost not yet invoiced, being purchase orders and subcontracts issued but not yet received as bills. Unapproved change order value and the days each has been sitting. Field hours by cost code against the estimate for that code. Days from pay application to cash by general contractor. Retainage outstanding by age. Signed backlog and the gross margin inside it.

Can I build a construction KPI dashboard in Excel or Power BI?

You can, and the tool is rarely why it fails. It fails because the numbers live in systems that do not talk: costs and payroll in the accounting ERP, commitments and change orders in the project platform, hours in a field app, cash in the bank. Sage publishes its own documentation for joining two of its own products, with budgets and commitments posting one way into Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate for corporate accounting and contract, cost and payment data coming back. Until that joining work is built and scheduled, a Power BI dashboard is a better looking version of the same stale spreadsheet.

How often should a construction company run a WIP report?

More often than most do. Deltek says it depends on your business goals, and that a company running regular financial reports with many ongoing projects may decide to create work in progress reports monthly or weekly. My own view, after twenty years of closing books, is that the monthly cadence exists because a human used to have to assemble it by hand. Once the data is joined the assembly costs nothing, and there is no argument left for finding out in October what your jobs did in September.

Where these numbers come from

The work in progress definitions and formulas, including percent complete as actual costs to date divided by revised estimated costs, and the definitions of overbilling and underbilling, are quoted from Deltek's guide to construction work in progress, read on 15 September 2026. The subcontractor payment figures come from Siteline's State of Subcontractor Billing in 2026, which states on its own page that 92 percent of subcontractors floated payroll last year, and from Contractor Magazine's report on the same survey of 492 construction finance and operations professionals in May 2026, which carries the 28 percent, 43 percent, 15 percent, one in five, 67 percent and 56 percent figures quoted above. Both were read on 15 September 2026. The description of what flows between Sage Construction Management and Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate is taken from Sage's own integration documentation. Product capabilities for Procore are from procore.com/platform, for Vista from Trimble, for FOUNDATION from Foundation Software, for Raken from rakenapp.com and for ServiceTitan from servicetitan.com, each read on 15 September 2026 and each quoted only for what the vendor says about its own product. No prices are quoted here because I did not read a price on a vendor page this run. The two dollar figures used to illustrate items four and five are invented for the sake of the example and are not measurements of any company.