Why Your Project Managers Can’t See Their Own Job Costs (And How to Fix It)

Here’s a scenario that plays out every week in construction companies across America:

A project manager gets called into a meeting. The CFO is concerned—Job 105020 is over budget. The PM is blindsided. They’ve been managing the project day-to-day, but they had no idea the financials were trending south.

How is this possible? Because most construction ERPs treat financial data like a vault: locked away, accessible only to the finance department.

The Information Gap

In a typical construction firm:

• Finance can see all job costs, commitments, and margins
• Project Managers can only see what they’re explicitly given (usually outdated spreadsheets)
• Executives wait for monthly reports that are already stale

This creates a dangerous disconnect. PMs make daily decisions about labor, materials, and subcontractors without knowing the cumulative financial impact. By the time finance catches an overrun, it’s often too late to course-correct.

Why ERPs Don’t Solve This

You might think: “We have Viewpoint/Acumatica/Sage—can’t PMs just log in and check their jobs?”

In theory, yes. In practice:

1. ERP interfaces are complex - Designed for accountants, not field personnel
2. License costs are prohibitive - Full ERP licenses are $200-500/month per user
3. Training requirements are high - PMs don’t have time for ERP certification
4. Data is fragmented - Costs, commitments, and revenue live in different modules

The result: PMs either don’t check at all, or they pester the finance team with constant requests.

The Self-Service Solution

What if PMs could get job cost answers themselves, without ERP training, using plain English?

“What’s the current margin on Job 105020?”

“Show me all change orders pending approval for the Downtown project”

“Compare labor costs to budget for the Smith Tower job, broken down by phase”

With natural language AI, these questions get instant answers—no finance team intervention required.

But What About Security?

The #1 objection from CFOs: “I don’t want PMs seeing financials for jobs they’re not managing.”

Valid concern. Modern AI query tools address this with:

• Row-level security - PMs only see data for their assigned jobs
• Read-only access - Nobody can modify the underlying ERP data
• Audit logging - Every query is recorded for compliance review
• Field-level restrictions - Hide sensitive columns (like vendor pricing tiers) while exposing totals

You can give PMs visibility without giving them the keys to the kingdom.

The ROI of Visibility

When PMs can see their own financials:

• Problems surface earlier - Overruns are caught at 5% instead of 25%
• Finance team is freed up - No more “quick question” interruptions
• Board meetings improve - Real-time data replaces “we’ll have to check on that”
• Accountability increases - Hard to blame “lack of information” when data is self-service

One of our customers estimated that PM self-service saved their finance team 12 hours per week in ad-hoc report requests alone.

Getting Started

Here’s a simple pilot program to test democratized job costing:

1. Week 1: Select 3-5 PMs and connect their jobs to a query tool
2. Week 2: Train them on 5-10 common questions
3. Week 3-4: Measure query volume and finance team time savings
4. Month 2: Roll out to all PMs based on results

Want to see how it works? Book a demo and we’ll show you job cost visibility in action using real construction data.