QScope

Cost and value

Cost and value reconciliation

Value from the last certificate and cost from the ledger at month end are not two sides of the same project. They are two different projects being compared with each other.

QScope Team·4 min read

One date governs both sides

  1. Open Cost and Value and add a period.
  2. Set the cut-off date. It applies to the value side and the cost side equally.
  3. Click Pull certified value to bring in the certified figure to that date.
Add one period per valuation cycle so the cut-off lines up with something that already exists, rather than a date chosen for the report.

The value side

  1. Certified value comes from your certificates.
  2. Enter work done but not yet certified.
  3. Enter variations at what you expect to settle at.
Carrying variations at application value rather than settlement value inflates the margin by the difference. That difference is rarely small, and it is where optimism enters a report that looks like arithmetic.

The cost side stays manual

QScope has no access to your accounts and does not pretend to. Cost invoiced, accruals and provisions are entered by hand.

  1. Enter cost invoiced to the cut-off.
  2. Enter accruals: cost incurred but not yet invoiced.
  3. Enter provisions for known risk: defects, damages exposure, disputed deductions.
A CVR reads the same wherever the project is: value against cost to one cut-off. QScope carries the currency for the market, and any VAT, GST or SST on the settled balance sits outside the margin rather than in it. Tax rates are starting points to verify locally.
QScope warns when accruals or provisions are nil. Missing accruals are why jobs report well for nine months and badly in month ten, when nothing changed except the post. Carrying no provisions is not neutrality; it assumes nothing will go wrong.

The movement is the report

The most useful line is the change since the previous period and the reason for it. There is a field for that reason, and it is the field worth filling in.

A movement nobody can explain is the one that turns into a write-down later.

Keep reading

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