Construction analytics for teams that live in tight margins.

Construction is a business of thin margins and long feedback loops. A project that looked healthy at month three can be eight points down by month ten, and by the time it shows up in the ledger it is usually too late to do much about it. Our construction analytics work is built for firms that want to see what is happening on their projects while there is still time to act, not after the final account.

The metrics that matter in construction

The core numbers barely change from firm to firm. Cost value reconciliation at project and portfolio level, programme progress against baseline, forecast final cost against budget, subcontractor spend and retentions, plant utilisation and idle time, materials variance, defects, and health and safety metrics including RIDDOR, near miss and observation rates. On top of that sits cash — applications, valuations, certifications and receivables aging.

None of this is exotic. What matters is having it in one place, refreshed weekly rather than at month end, drillable from portfolio to project to package, and available to commercial managers, quantity surveyors and project directors without a two-week wait for a bespoke report.

Where the data usually lives

Realistically, more than a few systems. Finance in COINS, Sage, Business Central or Oracle. Project controls in Primavera P6 or MS Project. Commercial in something like Eque2, RedSky or Causeway. Plant and hire in a specialist package or a spreadsheet. Health and safety in a bespoke tool or Ecosystem. Timesheets in one place, subcontractor valuations in another, and CVR spreadsheets everywhere.

Our default approach is a small Microsoft Fabric or Azure warehouse that pulls the necessary extracts nightly, joined on project, cost code and period. That single conformed model is the reason a portfolio dashboard can show CVR alongside programme, safety and cash without three teams arguing about which number is right.

Project margin and CVR reporting

The single highest value dashboard in most construction businesses is a live cost value reconciliation view. Committed cost, actual cost, accruals, applications, certifications and forecast to complete, all in one place, per project and rolled to portfolio. Once that is trusted, the monthly commercial meeting stops being a debate about numbers and becomes a conversation about interventions.

Programme, plant and safety

Programme reporting benefits from being cut against cost. Progress that is running ahead of spend usually means the baseline is optimistic, and progress that is running behind spend usually means productivity is soft — both easier to see in a dashboard than in a bar chart on a wall. Plant utilisation and idle days pay for themselves in a hire-heavy business inside a quarter. Safety analytics keep the board visibly on top of RIDDOR trends and observation quality.

Housebuilders and civil engineering

Housebuilders and civils firms use a similar analytics platform but with different top-level metrics. Housebuilders care about legal completions, reservation and cancellation rates, plot margins, sales prices against SAP, land bank movement and part exchange exposure. Civils firms care more about earned value, self delivery mix, plant intensity and claims exposure. The underlying data model is the same shape in both cases.

Related reading

Our data analytics for finance guide covers CFO-facing analytics in more detail, and the operations case study walks through a similar cost and programme analytics build.