It’s happened to you. It’s happened to your friend. It will probably happen to you again. You find inconsistencies, a calculation error, missing documentation or typos. Those issues require you to start over and make you paranoid the next time you review your data. As a result, you spend even more time checking documents because you’re worried about errors that expose you to risk. Together, these issues make it difficult to track costs confidently
First off, hats off to you for meticulously checking your data. Second, wouldn’t it be nice if you had a process for automatically catching issues when you still have time to do something about it? If you find the same errors happening frequently, set up automated workflows to check for your custom rules. If you’ve already implemented a real estate development management platform that’s great, it can do this for you automatically. If not, you need to consider digitizing your process as we discussed in step one. Sure, anyone can build a nifty macro that analyzes data, but housing the data where everyone can access it and alerting users immediately to issues is where the biggest efficiency gains lie.
Additionally, digital platforms allow you to track not only the costs that have been spent, but also the costs that are coming whether it is estimated on the PCO log or just known from a submittal or RFI. Tracking all of that in spreadsheets can make gaining confidence on the status of the project difficult. The whole goal is to make sure that your project has no lingering issues. Tracking potential change orders and exposures along with the complete contract history of a vendor will ensure that you always are alerted to potential issues in a timely manner.
