A live financial dashboard for a Texas construction firm
Most construction firms run their finances on a spreadsheet, a copy of QuickBooks, and the controller’s memory. It works, until it doesn’t.
In most firms the monthly routine is the same: two to three days rebuilding financial reports by hand. A controller pulls numbers from QuickBooks, formats them in Excel, allocates overhead across jobs manually, and emails PDFs to ownership. By the time the report lands, the month is already over.
So we build a live financial dashboard, configured around how a construction business actually runs. Here’s what it does.
Are we actually making money on each job?
Every construction firm builds a P&L. Almost none of them can answer that question with confidence.
Overhead gets lumped into one number. Sub-jobs hide inside parent jobs. By the time you can see whether a project was profitable, it’s already finished and the next one is halfway through.
This dashboard pulls daily from QuickBooks and breaks revenue, direct costs, and allocated overhead down to every active job, and every sub-job underneath it. Owners can see this morning whether last week’s work made or lost money. Not next month. This morning.
Job profitability, November 2026
Live from QuickBooks · overhead allocated across active jobs
Revenue (MTD)
$1,247,832
18.4% vs Oct
Direct costs
$842,116
67.5% of rev
Overhead
$143,520
4.1% vs Oct
Net profit
$262,196
21.0% margin
Active jobs
Click a job to drill into sub-jobs
Revenue
$487,420
Net profit
$132,722
Direct costs
$298,604
OH allocated
$56,094
Revenue
$182,340
Net profit
$42,642
Direct costs
$118,720
OH allocated
$20,978
Revenue
$164,210
Net profit
$50,489
Direct costs
$94,830
OH allocated
$18,891
Revenue
$140,870
Net profit
$39,591
Direct costs
$85,054
OH allocated
$16,225
Revenue
$412,108
Net profit
$80,256
Direct costs
$284,420
OH allocated
$47,432
Revenue
$218,940
Net profit
$41,430
Direct costs
$152,310
OH allocated
$25,200
Revenue
$193,168
Net profit
$38,826
Direct costs
$132,110
OH allocated
$22,232
Revenue
$214,560
Net profit
$10,950
Direct costs
$178,920
OH allocated
$24,690
Revenue
$98,420
Net profit
$4,950
Direct costs
$82,140
OH allocated
$11,330
Revenue
$116,140
Net profit
$6,000
Direct costs
$96,780
OH allocated
$13,360
Revenue
$133,744
Net profit
$38,268
Direct costs
$80,172
OH allocated
$15,304
Revenue
$89,420
Net profit
$26,882
Direct costs
$52,310
OH allocated
$10,228
Revenue
$44,324
Net profit
$11,386
Direct costs
$27,862
OH allocated
$5,076
Revenue
$1,247,832
Net profit
$262,196
Direct costs
$842,116
OH allocated
$143,520
The Riverside Estates job on this dashboard is sitting at 5.1% margin. On a monthly P&L, a job like that looks fine right up until it closes. The dashboard surfaces it three weeks earlier, early enough to actually do something about it.
Who owes us, and which of them are a problem?
Every aging report shows the same thing: how much you’re owed, broken into buckets. What they don’t show is which customers represent real risk.
This view flags it directly. One customer can quietly become half your overdue AR without anyone noticing. They always pay eventually, so they get the benefit of the doubt every month. Until they don’t.
Accounts receivable, November 2026
Outstanding invoices by age · concentration and risk flags
52% of overdue AR is owed by a single customer, Magnolia Properties LLC ($97,140 across 3 invoices, oldest 73 days).
27% of total AR is now over 30 days, up from 14% last month. Two new accounts crossed the threshold this week.
Outstanding by customer
Click a bucket above to filter
Current
–
1–30 days
–
31–60 days
$23,400
60+ days
$73,740
Current
–
1–30 days
$42,180
31–60 days
$38,920
60+ days
–
Current
$58,420
1–30 days
$24,310
31–60 days
–
60+ days
–
Current
$76,840
1–30 days
–
31–60 days
–
60+ days
–
Current
–
1–30 days
–
31–60 days
$31,860
60+ days
$18,930
Current
$48,210
1–30 days
$18,420
31–60 days
–
60+ days
–
Current
$54,320
1–30 days
–
31–60 days
–
60+ days
–
Current
–
1–30 days
$48,290
31–60 days
–
60+ days
–
Current
$44,180
1–30 days
–
31–60 days
–
60+ days
–
Current
–
1–30 days
$32,840
31–60 days
–
60+ days
–
Current
$18,420
1–30 days
$18,480
31–60 days
–
60+ days
–
Current
$12,450
1–30 days
–
31–60 days
–
60+ days
–
Current
$312,840
1–30 days
$184,520
31–60 days
$94,180
60+ days
$92,670
Magnolia Properties on this dashboard owes 52% of all overdue AR. That kind of concentration is the difference between a slow month and a missed payroll. The software flags it the moment it crosses a threshold the owner sets.
Can we make it through the next 60 days?
This is the question that wakes owners up at 2am. Bank balance doesn’t answer it. Neither does the P&L. The only way to answer it honestly is to project forward: money coming in, money going out, and what happens if either side slips.
The forecast pulls together everything the rest of the system already knows: confirmed receivables, scheduled bills, payroll dates, line of credit availability. It projects 60 days out and flags the lowest balance the business is likely to hit.
Cash flow forecast, next 60 days
Bank balance + expected receivables + scheduled bills + payroll
Projected lowest balance (next 60 days)
$84,200
on Dec 18, 3 days after the Magnolia invoice clears
Today's balance
$412,840
Expected in
$684,210
Scheduled out
$847,520
Projected balance
Upcoming cash events
The base case here shows a comfortable runway. But click ‘Magnolia pays late’ (the same customer flagged on the AR view) and the picture changes. The lowest projected balance drops below zero on December 18, the day before payroll.
That’s the conversation this software makes possible: not ‘what happened last month,’ but ‘what happens next month if our biggest risk customer slips again.’ Most owners are flying blind on that question. This dashboard answers it before it becomes a crisis.
What it changes
A dashboard like this turns two to three days of monthly reporting into minutes, and keeps the data current to this morning, not to three weeks ago.
But the bigger change is upstream. An owner can see which jobs are profitable while they’re still in progress, which customers represent real collection risk before they default, and whether the next 60 days hold up under stress. It turns the reactive financial question (‘why did we lose money on that job?’) into a proactive one: ‘this job is trending toward a thin margin, what do we do about it?’
That shift, from looking backward to looking forward, is the actual deliverable.
Could this work for your business?
Every engagement starts with a 10-minute conversation. We ask questions about how your operation runs, what reports you spend time on, and where decisions are getting made on stale data. If there’s a fit, we scope a build and send a fixed-price proposal within a week.