In this episode of the Leveled Up Contractor show I share with you how to use a job Pipeline Report to Manage your construction business. A Job Pipeline is a very important construction management tool because it allows you to view your pipeline balances at the various stages of your production cycle. In this video I share two versions of the pipeline report. The simple pipeline report and the advanced version that also measures the inflows and outflows. Use this report to take your construction business management to the next level.
Inside training you will learn:
- What a job pipeline report is.
- How to use a job pipeline report to manage your job pipeline and increase cash flow!
- Two different types of job pipeline reports “The Simple Pipeline Report” and the “Advanced Pipeline Report.”
And a lot more.
Watch the entire video:
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Transcript:
Welcome to the Leveled Up Contractor show. Now this is your first time here. Make sure to subscribe as we’re putting out weekly videos to help you grow and manage your contracting business. And if you want more of our templates, tools and training, check out our programs here.
In today’s training, what I want to talk about is what is a job pipeline report and how can you use a job pipeline report to manage your construction business? This is one of my favorite reports because it can really tell you a story and help you speed up cashflow. And if you’ve listened to any of my trainings at all, you constantly hear me preach about cashflow because it’s just so important.
The type of businesses that we run. That money’s got to come in. It’s an expensive business, a lot of expenses, a lot of money to go out, to pay for materials and labor and all the overhead that’s involved. So you got to get your money in and the only way to get the money in is to get jobs through the pipeline so that you can get them completed, get happy customers and collect the money at the end of the job.
And this pipeline report is how we get there. And I’m going to show you two different versions of this report. One version keeps us super simple. I’m going to walk you through that. And then we have a second version here that I’ll show you that’s a little bit more detailed, adds a little bit more information, and I’ll walk you through all of it and how it works.
What Is A Job Pipeline Report
So, first of all, guys, what is a job pipeline report and really what this is guys is it’s basically anything that you have sold that is somewhere in the pipeline, right? So you have been contracted to do work on a job. And it is considered an open job. So it hasn’t been paid in full and it hasn’t been closed out of your system.
So what you do with this is you break down every stage in your process. So when we sell a job, we have a status there for awaiting paperwork. We have a paperwork and approval status. We have a need scheduled stage. We have a scheduled stage. We have a pending start date stage. We have a work in progress stage, and jobs that are waiting for final invoices.
And then we have AR invoiced. So what this means guys is that these are the different stages of our pipeline. So this is awaiting paperwork bucket is telling me that I have $102,000 of signed contracts that are waiting for paperwork to get turned in so that we can get them built.
The paperwork and approval section here means that paperwork has been turned in and these jobs are getting reviewed and approved. Needs scheduled. This is jobs that have been approved, but we haven’t scheduled the jobs yet. Scheduled means that we have scheduled this job and it is waiting to go into production. And then we have pending start date.
This could be different things, maybe the homeowner isn’t ready to do the project yet, or something happened along the way and they had a delay, but you don’t have a confirmation on when you can build this yet. So you’re waiting on some things and you’re not sure of an exact start date.
Work in progress. This is all the jobs that you are actively working on. And then jobs waiting for final invoice. These are jobs that are completed and we’re waiting for either somebody to walk the job and approve that everything is good to go so we can invoice the customer, whatever the case may be, but they’re waiting for an invoice.
And then ultimately guys, we have our balance of everything that has been invoiced and the balance that is on those. So, this is like your AR balance. And guys, this number here represents the remaining balance of those jobs.
Job Pipeline Example
So for example, let’s say that this is $150,000 worth of contracts, right?
So we’ve signed $150,000 worth of jobs. And I have that much in awaiting paperwork. What this balance number represents is the remaining balance that we will get paid when we complete these jobs and invoice the customer. So. What that means is essentially I’ve had $47,000 in down payments on the jobs that are setting in awaiting paperwork.
Hence, that’s why I have $102,000 in this balance column. And the reason I like to make that distinction guys is because. One, when I’m looking at this from a cashflow perspective, I want to know that I have $102,000 coming my way, not 150,000. Now you may be someone that’s looking at this from a different perspective, and you’re saying, no, I don’t want to know how much money I have coming on these.
I want to know how much revenue is going to hit my profit and loss statement. Now, if that’s the case you may want to, instead of having a balanced column have a revenue column here that represents the revenue that will come through when these jobs come through the pipeline. And now if you wanted to, you could also track both, right?
I’m not going to completely build this out, but if you wanted to, you could insert a column here and call it revenue. Right. And you could plug in the revenue numbers for each one of these columns, and you could track that as well. So not going to do that for this report. Cause it’s not something we use, but that’s something you can do to customize it now.
Who is Responsible For Jobs In The Job Pipeline Report
One other key thing. That’s on the simple version of the job pipeline report is that I have the person that is responsible for it. So one of the things that we teach our clients and really focus on is getting your employees and your managers and the key people in your company to understand the numbers and take responsibility for them.
So if I want to know why I have $102,000 awaiting for paperwork. I’m going to my man, John here and say, John, what’s going on with this? Why do I have $102,000 right now that I can’t build? Because you haven’t approved the paperwork now for all I know without digging into this is that maybe he got a whole bunch of jobs dumped into his bucket today.
But if I’m reviewing this on a regular basis, I can monitor. And the same thing with the rest of these columns guys, if I’m going down through here and I’m like, man, we got $500,000, sitting in schedule jobs. Why is there so much money there? Is it because we don’t have materials or what’s going on that is causing that delay and why?
I have such a big backlog in my schedule category. So a lot you can do with this guy. So that’s the simple version of the report.
Advanced Job Pipeline Report
Now, if I click over here to the detailed version, you can see that we’ve added a few columns. Too keep this simple, I put the same exact stages, same exact people and all that kind of stuff.
But I want to explain to you a little bit about how this works. So beginning balance, incoming, outgoing, and ending balance. So if you notice something here, guys, If I go back to the other report, our balance was $2,249,247. If I come over here to the more complex version, you’ll see that we have that same exact balance. So at the end of the day, this ending balance column is the same as it is on my simple report because it’s tracking the same thing.
But what this allows me to do is to say, okay, the last time that I ran this report, I had $92,000 waiting for paperwork. Incoming means that I had $76,000 worth of new jobs coming into awaiting for paperwork. So I had 92,000, I had $76,000 worth of new jobs come in and I approved almost 66,000. So if I do the math on that guys, what that means is I started with $92,000. In this bucket. The last time I ran this report, the sales reps turned in $76,000 worth of contracts.
So I added that amount to our beginning balance. However, I also approved $65,000. So if I back out the outgoing column and I press enter here, guys, you’ll see, it gets us to our ending balance. So. This is helpful because I can track the progress of what’s happening in these different buckets.
I can go down here and I can look through this and I can say, okay, we had $521,000 in sales. Or the last time that I looked at this report and this time we had 500,000 now at first glance, I might look at that and say, are you kidding me? We only produced $21,000. And got that out of scheduled work what the heck is going on there?
However, what you’ll notice guys is that, that isn’t the case. So I started with 521,000. I produced 218,000 of those jobs to get them out of scheduled. However, I had $197,000 more dollars, turned in that I got scheduled. So that went up and then that leaves me with a balance in that bucket of $500,000.
So this really adds to the visibility of what you can see. Now, a really cool thing to do with this, and I’m not going to demonstrate it in this video. But something you should definitely do is you would have another tab on this sheet that basically has the details of all these different buckets.
And the way I usually set these up actually is it’s not something that I hand key in as I usually have a data tab here that has all my pipeline jobs in it. So there might be 10 jobs in a waiting for paperwork. There might be 50 jobs that are sitting in scheduled and, you know, 20 jobs that are in need scheduled or whatever the case may be.
But I would have a detailed tab on this spreadsheet that would have all the detailed jobs in it. And then all of these over here would just be formulas. That’s summing the information from that detailed tab. So when you do it that way guys, if you’re like Man, this awaiting for paperwork looks off.
What is going on here? Well, then you just click over to the other tab and it’s a sorted by the stage. So you can dive in and look at it and figure out what’s going on. So you have the, the high levels that you can identify, things that look weird to you, and then you have the detailed version on the back end.
So you can start to dive into that information. So guys, this is one of the most powerful reports that we use in our business. You know, like I said, cashflow is such a huge thing for us and this really just helps us, you know, stay on top of that, see where our money is being held up.
And that way we can start pushing things through the pipeline, get our jobs done, get happy customers and get our money collected.
Other things you should check out:
- 3 Pieces To A Successful AR System For Contractors
- How To Master Cash Flow In Your Business
- How To Map And Systemize Your Entire Business
Get Access to the FREE CHEATSHEET: The 5 Reports Every Contractor Must Have To Run And Manage Their Business By The Numbers
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