When Cost Data Lives in Too Many Places
You wouldn't trust a bank that tracked your money in a spreadsheet, yet many capital projects still manage millions in construction spend that way. The result is broken formulas, stale data, and reports that decision-makers struggle to trust.
Mastt co-founder and CEO Doug Vincent, shows a better way to run project cost management, including a live demo that builds a cost report, reconciles ERP data, and creates a dashboard in minutes.
What You'll Learn
- How manual cost reporting can cost around $40,000 per project each year in labor.
- The difference between project accounting and business accounting, and why the two teams often disagree on what "paid" means.
- A progress payment, payment certificate, and invoice workflow that gets the cost report reconciled within about three days of month end.
- How AI in Mastt turns contracts, invoices, and variations/change orders into a cost report, then checks progress payments against the contract.
- How to reconcile an ERP export against your cost report by matching purchase order numbers.
- Why dashboards and shorter reports beat long monthly packs, when Mastt's research shows 40% of a typical report is repeated content.
Chapters
- 00:00 Project cost management with AI, live dashboards and ERP data
- 03:43 Why spreadsheets fail construction cost management
- 06:19 What is the cost of cost management?
- 07:53 Key project cost management data owners must track
- 10:27 Construction cost report: budget, commitments, FFC and EAC
- 12:35 Cash flow forecasting: monthly, cumulative and baseline
- 14:04 Project accounting vs business accounting
- 16:00 Why "paid" differs: purchase orders, accruals, Security of Payment Act
- 19:53 How do progress payments, certificates and ERP payments connect?
- 22:25 Mastt live demo: AI uploads of contracts, invoices, variations/change orders
- 28:56 AI checks payments and generates payment certificates
- 31:52 ERP reconciliation: match SAP payments by purchase order
- 35:52 Shareable live cost reports, as EVT and Colliers use
- 39:01 Stop documenting, start decision-making in monthly reports
- 40:17 How long should monthly, finance and board reports be?
- 40:52 Project cost management lessons from 10 countries
- 43:09 What does "paid" mean for finance and project teams?
- 43:37 Cash vs accrual reporting and cash flow baselines
Who It's For
- Project owners and developers who want more confidence and control over project costs.
- Capital delivery teams ready to move beyond spreadsheet-heavy processes and static monthly reporting.
- Client-side project managers and superintendents who assess progress payments and certify payments.
- Cost controllers and contract administrators who keep the cost report up to date.
- Finance leaders who need project costs to line up with the ERP.
Start Simple and Kill the Spreadsheets
Doug's advice is to start with the basics. You don't need a full SAP integration on day one. Get contracts, invoices, and payments into one system, get the reports working, and build further efficiencies from there.
Mastt comes with AI uploads, ERP reconciliation, and live dashboards built in. Check out Mastt's construction project cost management software and see it running on real project work.
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