Detailed Tracking of Change Orders

The team at 4castplus has listened to a great many project managers and cost engineers express their need for better control and reporting around change orders. As an area of project management that poses a great deal of risk and potential for cost overruns, providing powerful data capture and reporting on change orders was a top-tier priority for us.

Tracking costs directly to a change order is a critical way to monitor progress, budget and hours on change orders. This enables project managers to achieve precise and tight controls at all levels – and micro-levels – of a project.

4castplus facilitates deep project cost transparency with its built-in project tracking for actual costs & revenues. What you may not know, is that there is an additional level of tracking, also built in, that leverages the tight connections between 4castplus Change Orders and its labor, equipment and materials tracking module. Users can identify a specific change order against which they are able to apply their labor time, equipment usage, materials consumption, purchase order incurred costs, invoices, etc.  By making these connections, 4castplus enables explicit micro-tracking of any change order for reporting on estimated versus actual on the change order.  In addition to that, all underlying cost codes on the work breakdown structure are implicitly updated with the details tracked against the change order. In other words, with a single tracking entry, cost and hours information is propagated to multiple places so that, regardless of how you want to pivot your project reporting, the actual costs and hours will be reflected.

Under the covers, a change order in 4castplus is treated a bit like a project-within-a-project. It has its own budget, resources, timeline, cost codes, status, etc. Treating it like that comes in handy for the project manager. He can report on both the project as a whole – which will aggregate all the planning and tracking details of all change orders in the project – or alternatively drill-down to isolate pieces of the project. These project pieces can include resources, disciplines, cost code elements, work packages, and of course, change orders.

If you’d like to hear more, or would like to tell us about how you manage the detail costs, revenues and activities on change orders, we’d love to hear from you. Please contact us on info@4castplus.com.