Every building business needs one weekly report, not twenty. It should land in your inbox on Monday morning, take a few minutes to read, and cover five things: your cash position, progress claims still unpaid, budget versus actual on every active job, costs you've committed to but haven't been invoiced for yet, and the key dates coming up in the next fortnight. If you can see those five on one page every week, you'll catch most problems while there's still time to do something about them.
The trouble with most construction reporting is that there's too much of it, it arrives too late, and nobody reads it. The month-end pack shows up three weeks after the month closed. The job cost report is forty pages long. The cash flow spreadsheet was last updated by someone who has since left. A short weekly snapshot beats all of it.
The five construction KPIs that matter
1. Cash position
How much cash is in the bank right now, and can you cover the next couple of payroll runs and your big supplier payments without relying on a claim being paid on time? This is the number that keeps the lights on. Show it next to the outgoings due in the next two weeks, not on its own.
2. Progress claims outstanding
The total value of claims you've submitted but haven't been paid for, broken down by age. Claims that are a few weeks old need a follow-up call. Claims that are well past their due date are a problem and should be on the director's list, not just the bookkeeper's. Under security of payment legislation, timing matters, so the age of each claim is as important as the amount.
3. Budget versus actual by active job
For each live project, a simple comparison: what did we budget, what have we spent so far, and what's the projected final cost? Set your own tolerance and flag any job where the forecast final cost has drifted past it. One line per job is enough. If a job is flagged, that's when you open the detailed cost report, not before.
4. Committed costs not yet invoiced
Purchase orders and subcontract agreements where the work is underway but the invoices haven't arrived. This is money you'll owe soon. It's the number most builders forget about until the bills land, and it's the reason a job can look fine on Monday and terrible at month end. Without it, your budget versus actual is only half the picture. This is also the core of honest WIP reporting.
5. Upcoming milestones
Key dates in the next two weeks: claim submission deadlines, inspections, practical completion targets, subcontractor start dates, retention release dates. A missed claim date pushes your cash out by a whole cycle.
Why most builders stop producing this report
If you're compiling this report by hand, it will take a big chunk of somebody's Monday, and after a few busy weeks it quietly stops happening. The usual reasons:
- The numbers live in different places. Cash is in Xero or MYOB, job budgets are in a spreadsheet, committed costs are in the project management system (or someone's email), and milestones are in the program.
- Nobody trusts the job cost figures. If costs are coded to jobs inconsistently, the budget versus actual line is wrong, and people stop reading it.
- It's always somebody's extra job. Reports that depend on one person's spare time don't survive a busy month.
The fix isn't a better template. It's getting the data to flow on its own.
How to automate the Monday report
When your accounting system, job costing and project management tools are connected, this report can be generated automatically and sitting in your inbox before you've had your first coffee. In practice that usually means:
- Pull cash and claims from the accounting system. Xero and MYOB both have APIs that expose bank balances, invoices and payment status.
- Pull budgets, purchase orders and subcontracts from your job costing or project tool. Procore, Buildertrend, Simpro and similar systems all expose this data, as do most estimating spreadsheets if they're kept in a consistent format.
- Match everything to a job number. This is where most of the work is. Every cost, PO and claim needs to carry the same job reference across systems.
- Build the report once. A Power BI report or a simple scheduled email does the job. Keep it to one page.
- Schedule it. Refresh overnight on Sunday, email it out at a set time Monday morning.
For example, if your supervisors raise POs in a project tool but your bookkeeper enters supplier bills in MYOB, the integration links each bill back to its PO so committed-but-not-invoiced is worked out automatically rather than guessed. We cover this kind of setup on our construction financial visibility page and in builder accounting integration.
Getting started without a big project
You don't need to automate everything at once. A sensible order:
- Start with cash and claims, because they come straight from the accounting system and are the easiest to get right.
- Add budget versus actual once your job coding is consistent.
- Add committed costs when purchase orders are being raised in a system, not on paper.
- Add milestones last.
Even a partly automated version is better than a perfect report nobody produces. If you also want a forward view, the same data feeds construction cash flow forecasting.
Frequently asked questions
What KPIs should a construction company track?
Start with five: cash position, progress claims outstanding, budget versus actual by active job, committed costs not yet invoiced, and upcoming milestones. They cover cash, profit and what's coming. Add others, such as safety or labour utilisation, once these are reliable every week.
What should a weekly report for a construction business include?
Cash position against upcoming outgoings, progress claims outstanding by age, budget versus actual for each active job, committed costs not yet invoiced, and key dates for the next two weeks. Keep it to one page and only drill into detail when something is flagged.
Can Xero or MYOB produce this report on their own?
Partly. They hold cash, invoices and payments, but they usually don't hold job budgets, purchase orders, subcontract commitments or program dates. That's why the report needs data from your job costing or project system as well.
How long does it take to set up an automated weekly report?
It depends on how many systems are involved and how clean your job coding is. A report built from Xero or MYOB plus one project system is a much smaller job than one pulling from several spreadsheets. We scope each one and give a fixed quote after a free initial chat.
Who should receive the Monday report?
The directors, the person who manages cash, and the project managers for the jobs listed. Everyone should be looking at the same numbers so the Monday meeting is about decisions, not about whose figures are right.
If you'd like a Monday report that builds itself from the systems you already use, book a free initial chat and we'll talk through what you've got and what it would take.