Reports
How much are you actually making on this job, and when do you know?
Most small builders discover a job’s real margin at the final account, which is the one moment nothing can be done about it. The trade’s answer is the CVR: value earned against cost incurred, measured to the same date, every month, so the bad news arrives while it is still cheap.
QScope Team·31 December 2025·5 min read
No statute here, just the most useful table in commercial building. CVR stands for cost value reconciliation, and the idea fits in one sentence: what has this job earned to date, what has it cost to date, and is the gap the margin I priced? The craft is entirely in the two words “to date”.
The value side: earned, not invoiced
Value is what the work done so far is worth under the contract: the measured work at bill rates, variations at their values, dayworks, materials on site where they are claimable. Note what it is not: it is not what you have applied for, nor what has been certified, and certainly not what has been paid, those lag reality by weeks, and a CVR built on them tells you about your paperwork, not your job. If the certified figure is far below your honest earned value, that gap is its own finding, with its own page.
The cost side: incurred, not paid
Cost is what the work done so far has cost: labour used, materials used (not bought, the pile in the yard is stock, not cost), subcontract work done including work done and not yet invoiced to you, plant time, and the job’s share of running the business. The classic self-deception lives here: invoices not yet arrived make the month look profitable, and the accrual, counting the sub’s done-but-unbilled work as cost now, is what separates a CVR from wishful thinking.
Reading the result
The number matters less than the trend. One month’s margin is noise, three months moving the wrong way is a diagnosis, and the standard causes have their own page: where the profit on a job quietly disappears. Two readings deserve immediate action rather than monitoring: value running ahead of honest cost on a heavily front-loaded bill, which means the remaining work is underfunded and the end of the job will be hungry; and margin fine while cash is terrible, which routes you to the cash position page, because earning money and having it are different problems.
And distinguish the CVR from its forward-looking cousin: the CVR says how it is going, a cost report says where it will land. On a small job a final-cost column on the same table does the job.
On a domestic job, and on a small one
Nothing here changes with the client: a CVR is your internal instrument and neither the Construction Act nor the homeowner ever sees it. The honest objection is size: on a six-week bathroom the CVR is the quote and a shoebox of receipts, fine. The threshold is the job long enough to go wrong slowly, three months or more, which is exactly the 100k-plus work this series is about. One evening a month is the entire cost of never again being surprised by your own final account.
What to do this week
1. Build the first table for your biggest live job: earned value line by line, incurred cost by category, same date, one page.
2. Book the recurring hour, same day as the valuation each month, so the value side is already fresh.
3. Write down the priced margin at the top of the table, because the whole point is comparing against it, and by month four nobody remembers what it was.
Where the information stops
A CVR measures; it does not rescue. If three honest months show the margin gone, the decisions that follow, repricing the remainder, renegotiating, or finishing fast and clean, are commercial judgement with your accountant in the room, and the table’s job was done the day it made the conversation unavoidable.