Built from a question I could not answer.

Busy did not always mean profitable

The contracting company where this story began has been working for more than three decades. It is a separate business from ValueLAB MB, the company that now operates ActualCost. I joined that contracting business many years ago, initially working and learning alongside people with far more experience than me. Later, when I became a shareholder, I began asking more questions about how the contracting company was really performing.

We were busy and the work kept moving, but the money left in the company did not always reflect that activity. I asked a simple question: where are we earning money, and where are we losing it?

The usual answer was that some jobs were profitable and others were not. But nobody could clearly identify which individual jobs were responsible. Without that information, we could not systematically improve our estimates.

The project total was not enough

I looked for software that could answer this question. Many systems focused on employees clocking in and out of an entire project. That was not enough for the way we worked. I needed to record where each person had worked and, more importantly, which specific job they had worked on.

The first version was a simple mobile-accessible labour log for the contracting company. Projects, employees and labour rates came first. Then I listed the individual jobs inside each project and connected every labour entry to the correct job.

That changed what we could see. Instead of knowing only the total cost of a project, we could compare the estimated and actual cost of each job. Materials and subcontractor costs were added next, followed by billings, remaining budgets and the result produced by the team’s work.

Better information creates better estimates

If a particular job repeatedly costs more than expected, its price can be corrected. If another produces an unusually high margin, its price can be adjusted to keep the overall quotation competitive. The objective is not simply to charge more. It is to understand the real price of the work and build balanced, informed estimates.

ActualCost also makes the result per team day visible. Every company has its own overheads, operating costs and profitability expectations, so the software does not impose a universal target. It provides the calculation; each company decides what a healthy result means for its own business.

Additional work should not disappear

Construction projects change. Early estimates may be based on incomplete designs, while architects, clients and site conditions introduce additional work later. In a busy small company, those changes are easy to forget. Much of the day is spent solving site problems, organising people, supplying materials and ensuring that workers are not left waiting.

When additional work is recorded against the correct project and job as it happens, it remains visible. It can later be grouped, filtered, reviewed and included in billing where the contract allows. The company keeps a record of what was actually done instead of trying to reconstruct the project from memory weeks later.

From an internal system to ActualCost

ActualCost grew from this working system and from the needs of that real contracting company. It connects estimates, labour, materials, subcontractors, additional work and billings to the jobs that created them.

ValueLAB MB is a separate company responsible for developing and operating ActualCost. The contracting experience behind the product belongs to the founder and the long-established contracting business where the original system was created—not to ValueLAB MB.

It is being built for small teams that need a clear view of their real project costs while there is still time to learn, adjust and act.