The job is 60% spent. Is it 60% built?
Every builder knows what has been spent, because the invoices tell them. Almost nobody knows what has been earned — how much of the work those invoices were meant to buy is actually on the ground. Earned value puts the two side by side on every cost code, so a job going wrong shows up in week six rather than at the final claim.
Available on the Builder plan
Budget, earned, spent — and nothing you have to type in
The whole method rests on three figures per cost code. SmarteBuild already holds all three, which is why this is a page you read rather than a spreadsheet you maintain.
- Budget
- The cost-code budget from your estimate, plus every approved variation against that code
- Spent
- Supplier invoices recorded against the job. Approved timesheets can be included with a tick
- Earned
- How much of each budget the work done has earned — progress comes from the schedule
Everything is as at today, and every figure is one you can open up and check.
Two questions a cost report cannot answer
A cost-to-date report tells you what has gone out. It cannot tell you whether that money bought what it was supposed to buy, or whether the job is on time.
Over or under
Earned against spent. Ninety-four cents of work for every dollar out is a job running over, and you can see which cost codes are doing it.
Ahead or behind
Earned against what should have been done by today. It is the same arithmetic a quantity surveyor does by hand, on every cost code at once.
What it will finish at
The forecast final cost, worked out from how the job is running so far rather than from what you hoped when you priced it.
Each one is written out in plain English on the page as well as in the usual indexes, so you do not need to remember which ratio is which.
Read it by cost code, or line by line
Cost codes are the level you manage a job at: concrete, framing, roofing. Switch toBy item and the same job is broken down to individual bill lines, which is where you look once a trade is clearly running over.
Click any row and the panel behind it opens: the schedule tasks that produced the progress, and the supplier invoices that produced the spend, each one a link through to the task on the Gantt or the invoice itself. Export CSV takes whatever you are looking at into a spreadsheet for a bank or a client.
Where progress comes from
A task in the schedule that carries its cost centre reports progress against that cost code, weighted by how long the task runs. That is the accurate way, and it costs nothing beyond filling the cost centre in.
Where tasks do not carry one, the overall progress of the job is used instead and the row says so, rather than quietly presenting a guess as a measurement.
The S-curve, drawn from your own job
The table is today. History is the same three figures recorded every day and drawn as three lines: what should have been done, what has been earned, and what has gone out.
The gap is the story
Earned below planned is time. Spent above earned is money. The distance between the lines is the size of the problem, and the slope tells you whether it is still growing.
Pin any day
Click a point on the curve and the whole page reads as at that day — useful when a client asks where the job stood at the end of last month.
Or read it as numbers
Show as table turns the curve into the figures behind it, and both the table and the curve export.
The point of knowing in week six
A job that ends 8% over is not usually a job that went wrong at the end. It is a job that was 8% over by the time the frame went up, on a couple of cost codes nobody had totalled. That is exactly what this page shows, while there is still enough work left to do something about it.
A closer look at earned value
The curves, the detail behind a row, and the two levels you can read it at.
What it connects to
Nothing in SmarteBuild is an island — that is the point of it. Earned Value reads from and feeds into these.
Progress Claims
Claim by percentage or by stage, variations included, and track payment
Cash Flow
What the job costs you and when, projected across the programme
Schedule & Gantt
Plan the build, move a date, and see what shifts with it
Expenses & Invoices
Match invoices to orders and watch cost-to-date against budget
Want the detail?
The help centre documents Earned Value step by step, with worked examples — written for people using it, not for a brochure.
Start with one job and see
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