Job Cost Tracking in Sage 100 Contractors

Every construction owner knows this pain: You finish a project thinking you made 8% profit, but when the books close, you're lucky to see 2%. Without accurate, real-time cost tracking by phase and cost code, you're flying blind. You can't make informed buyout decisions, you over-bill or under-bill clients, and you don't catch cost overruns until it's too late to fix them. This is where Sage 100 Contractor becomes your financial control tower.

In this guide, we'll show you exactly how Sage 100 Contractor's job costing system helps you track every dollar, make better decisions, and protect your margins with real screenshots and examples from actual projects. Whether you're a general contractor, specialty contractor, or home builder, proper job costing isn't optional anymore. Let's break down how Sage 100 does it right.

Table of Contents:

• Take Complete Control of Your Business With Sage 100 Contractor

• Understanding Cost Codes in Sage 100 Contractor

• Cash Flow Reporting Based on Cost Codes

• The Committed Costs Report: Your Buyout Control Center

• Take Action: Start Tracking Job Costs the Right Way

Take Complete Control of Your Business With Sage 100 Contractor

Sage 100 Contractor gives small to mid sized contractors access to critical, end-to-end business and project information. It helps you take complete control of every aspect of the construction cycle including:

• Accounting: General ledger, AP, AR, payroll

• Estimating: Takeoffs, bid management

• Project Scheduling: Timeline and resource management

• Job Costing: Real-time cost tracking by phase and code

• Service Management: For service-based contractors

This comprehensive approach is critical in construction, where tracking job costs properly is a decisive element contributing to better profitability, accurate project estimating, informed management decisions, and timely financial reporting.

Whether you're a general contractor, services or specialty contractor, or a home builder, job costing at some level is essential for making effective business decisions. You need to be able to analyze direct costs for your projects, effectively assess your profitability, validate the accuracy of your estimating process, and understand the financial trajectory of your business as a whole.

The bottom line: If you can't track costs accurately, you can't manage them. And if you can't manage them, you're leaving money on the table.

Understanding Cost Codes in Sage 100 Contractor

Cost codes are the foundation of the job costing system in Sage 100 Contractor. They allow you to separate costs into different categories and compare budgeted costs to actual costs for each job.

What Are Cost Codes?

Cost codes are detailed classifications of all job expenses, organized based on the types of work your company performs. Sage 100 Contractor organizes job costs in order of detail by:

1. Job (the project itself)

2. Phase (major sections of work)

3. Cost Code (specific types of work within each phase)

4. Cost Type (labor, materials, equipment, subcontractors, other)

Important: Cost codes are company-specific, not job-specific. This means you create a master cost code structure that applies across all your projects, ensuring consistency and making comparative analysis possible.

The Cost Code Flow Through Sage 100

The use of cost codes begins with Takeoffs and flows through every module in Sage 100 Contractor:

1. Takeoffs & Estimates: You build your initial budget using cost codes

2. Schedule of Values: Cost codes determine how you'll bill the project

3. Project Management: Budgets, Subcontracts, Purchase Orders, and Change Orders all reference cost codes

4. Accounts Payable: When you pay vendors, costs are assigned to specific cost codes

5. Payroll: Labor hours are allocated to cost codes

6. General Ledger: All job cost entries ultimately flow to "Cost of Goods Sold" accounts

This integrated flow ensures that every dollar spent is tracked to a specific phase and cost code, giving you unprecedented visibility into where your money is actually going.

Read more: How to Create Effective Construction Cost Codes for Maximum Profitability

Using CSI Cost Code Standards

Because Sage 100 Contractor uses divisions to subtotal costs for reporting, many contractors create divisions based on the formalized division list from the Construction Specification Institute (CSI).

The CSI MasterFormat is the industry-standard system for organizing construction specifications and cost data. Using CSI codes provides several advantages:

• Industry consistency: Easier to compare projects and benchmark against industry data

• Subcontractor alignment: Most subs already use CSI codes, reducing confusion

• Estimating accuracy: Historical cost data from previous projects becomes more reliable

• Client familiarity: Many owners and architects expect CSI-based breakdowns

Here's an example of a streamlined CSI Cost Code list in Sage 100 Contractor:

The beauty of CSI codes is their flexibility, you can customize these divisions and add sub-codes based on your specific project types and reporting needs. Whether you're doing commercial build-outs, residential construction, or heavy civil work, the CSI framework adapts to your business.

Cash Flow Reporting Based on Cost Codes

Importing your cost code list early in your software implementation process is essential, and may require input from all members of your team estimators, project managers, and accounting staff should all have a say.

Setting up a proper cost tracking system makes it easy to generate powerful cash flow reports. With Sage 100 Contractor, you can run a detailed Cash Flow by Cost Code report that shows your billing, costs, and cash flow per cost code:

By looking at your cash flow column on the right, you can know where you must increase your billing on your next requisition, and where you may need to keep an eye out for your costs.

How to Read This Report

Notice three critical columns in this Cash Flow report:

1. Billing column (left): Shows what you've invoiced to the client to date for each cost code

2. Costs column (middle): Shows actual costs incurred (labor, materials, subs, equipment)

3. Cash Flow column (far right): The difference between billing and costs—this is your working capital position by cost code

Why This Matters

By looking at your cash flow column on the right, you can immediately identify:

Positive cash flow (green): You've billed more than you've spent good for working capital, but watch for over-billing issues

Negative cash flow (red flag): You've spent more than you've billed. This means:

• You need to increase billing on your next requisition for this cost code

• You may have a cost overrun that needs investigation

• You might be under-billing due to incomplete change order tracking

Example: If HVAC shows -$15,000 in cash flow, it means you've incurred $15K more in HVAC costs than you've billed to the client. This could be legitimate (work completed but not yet billed) or a red flag (cost overrun or missed billing).

Read more: 5 Ways to Improve Cash Flow in Your Construction Business

The Committed Costs Report: Your Buyout Control Center

In addition to cash flow tracking, Sage 100 Contractor provides a detailed Committed Costs report that's essential for managing your buyouts and subcontracts throughout the project lifecycle.

This report shows you:

• Original Budget: What you estimated for each cost code

• Committed Costs: What you've locked in via Purchase Orders and Subcontracts

• Actual Costs: What you've actually paid out to date

• Remaining Budget: Budget minus (Committed + Actual costs)

Using This Report for Decision-Making

Smart project managers review the Committed Costs report:

• Weekly during buyout phase: To ensure all major costs are committed before work begins

• Monthly during construction: To catch cost overruns early when they can still be corrected

• Before change order pricing: To understand how much budget margin you have to work with

Take Action: Start Tracking Job Costs the Right Way

These are practical, easy-to-implement guidelines that you can use to start properly tracking your company's job costs, understand your profitability on a division-by-division basis, and make important decisions early during your projects when they can still make a difference.

Ready to Take Control of Your Job Costs?

Construction Cost Accounting specializes in Sage 100 Contractor implementation and optimization. We don't just install the software, we build you a complete job costing system tailored to your business, your project types, and your reporting needs.