Premier Construction Software: The Hidden Cost of a Three-Week Close

Why Canadian Construction Firms Are Losing Time, Margin, and Control

In our work with more than 1000 construction businesses across North America, one pattern surfaces: The month ends, and the finance team begins the same exercise again. Reconcile the bank and credit card accounts. Track down missing invoices. Gather intel on job progress from the operations team. Export all the reports and rebuild the WIP by hand. The month closes, only now it’s two, sometimes three months into the next month.

By the time you’re reviewing forecasted job reports, the numbers are already outdated. You are no longer looking at where the job stands, but where it stood weeks ago, with little time left to respond or act. For a business, that lag could be the difference between earning margin and losing it.

The Close Is Telling You Something

A slow close looks like a finance problem. In our experience, it rarely is. It is a data problem that surfaces at month-end, when the disconnected pieces finally have to be forced together.

The benchmarks bear this out. According to APQC’s long-running accounting benchmarks, the median company closes its books in roughly six days, while the slowest group takes ten or more. Companies’ complex revenue recognition, such as those in construction, routinely take eight to twelve business days or longer. A close that stretches beyond two weeks indicates an opportunity to improve operational excellence.

The more useful question is why the close takes that long in the first place.

Why Construction Makes It Harder

In most industries, the numbers live in one place. In construction, they are scattered across the business.

Job costs sit in spreadsheets. Project management lives in a separate tool. Accounting runs in another system entirely, and the field operates on paper or an app connected to none of it. Month-end becomes a manual reassembly: export, reconcile, re-key, and trust that no one mistyped a figure along the way. A 2024 academic review spanning decades of research found that roughly 94% of business spreadsheets contain errors.

Then come the problems unique to this industry. WIP reports built by hand are out of date the moment they are finished. Estimates-at-completion shift depending on which project manager you ask, because they are not tied to live commitments and actuals. Forecasting also varies by Project Manager because you’re working with dated numbers and standardizing this process is difficult with data sitting in multiple sources. WIP is critical in this industry because it drives accurate revenue recognition, billing discipline, and realistic views of profitability and risk.

The real challenge with a dated WIP schedule is the ability to affect change on the job as quickly as possible to mitigate any negative impact on margin.

Late Books, Lost Margins

Cost overruns remain one of the industry’s most stubborn problems. KPMG’s Global Construction Survey has found that only a minority of projects, roughly one quarter, finish within 10% of their budget. McKinsey has measured overruns on large projects as high as 80%. Much of that loss is a visibility problem: the Project Management Institute attributes a third of project failures to poor communication and information that arrives too late.

When financials run three weeks behind, every decision is made in the rearview mirror. Receiving a three-week-old close is like getting the soil report after the foundation has already been poured: the information is accurate, and it is useless. A job trending over budget in week one does not surface until the margin has already eroded. You cannot correct what you cannot see, and you cannot see it when the data is always a month old.

A Close That Keeps Pace With the Work

A construction ERP built for the way the business actually runs changes the equation. When job costs and the general ledger stay in sync automatically, there is no dual entry and no waiting on month-end to know where a job stands. A WIP report takes two clicks rather than a week in Excel. Forecasts update from real commitments and actuals, so estimates at completion hold up in front of a lender or a board. Every entity is consolidated in one platform, with intercompany entries handled automatically, and every transaction carries an audit trail that turns audit season into a routine exercise.

This is what Premier was built to deliver. Gillam Group, a Premier customer, found that real-time cost access let their project managers track estimates at completion 20% more accurately. Mark Marshall of JM Construction put it in terms every owner understands: he trusts his numbers now, and that confidence helped lift his margins from 3% to 8%.

That is the difference between closing the books on a month that has ended and managing the month while it is still underway.

I recently heard a quote from Sarah Wells on operational excellence, “It’s invisible when it’s done well, but absolutely noticeable when it’s absent”. This is what Premier helps its customers deliver through its platform – operational excellence across all departments in a construction organization through real-time visibility, communication and reporting.

Build Smart. Close Faster.

The contractors who move ahead over the coming years will not necessarily be the largest or the most established. They will be the ones who can see their numbers in real time and correct course while there is still time to act. The month-end close should not be what stands in the way.

See why Canadian contractors are switching.

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