Trie确定确切的percentage of completion of a construction project in progress is like pinpointing the exact location of a moving train. The errors in calculating profit from work-in-progress (WIP) can be a nightmare for both contractors and their accountants.

What if a contracting company knew the historic profit level associated with a particular manager or customer? And what if a contractor was able to anticipate or periodically correct the anticipated results based on its knowledge of this history?

I decided that was the best way to operate several years ago, when I was a consultant to companies and a professor of construction management. After studying thousands of construction financial statements, I became convinced that industry profits have been, and continue to be, overstated by more than one percent—a significant amount when you consider that profits are already slim.

而且这种利润流血（有时也称为利润淡出）很难检测到。在增长期间，它没有引起注意，因为更多的盈利WIP掩盖了其他项目的利润蒸发。新利18备用网址在市场下降的情况下，这一局势尚未引起人们的注意，因为表现不佳归咎于业务放缓。

One of the issues with WIP reporting is that it is an estimate based on two other estimates: first, the original estimate of project cost and, second, the estimate of the percentage complete of the work at a given point in time. The process relies on accurate field reporting, which is problematic because accurate means precise and an estimate is an opinion. (I hesitate to refer to it as “an approximation based on two guesses,” but that’s how some people have described it.)

WIP可以代表50％或更多的年度报告利润，因此错误可能会误导承包商认为即使他们正朝着破产迈进，他们也可以盈利。无论它们是偶然的还是故意的，错误都会掩盖性能，以使衡量利润或损失最多成为近似。看到最初估计的项目成本中有40％的承包商通常认为40％的工作已经完成。新利18备用官网登录

一个很好的例子：一家沮丧的大型建筑公司让我参与了有关其预计利润不断波动的事情。我的解决方案是根据执行报告的工作人员的历史表现，调整报告的WIP现场信息更接近现实。

In this firm, two dozen project managers were responsible for reporting the project percent complete on their respective projects. A study of the data from the prior five years demonstrated that some project managers were continually optimistic and the profits they foresaw had by the completion of their projects fallen off. I call this “profit bleed.” Other project managers did the opposite, under-reporting profits early in the work that regularly resulted in profit improvement at project’s end. I refer to this as “sandbagging.”

我开始通过计算平均出血或sandbagging for each project manager over the prior five years and determining if the averages were changing over time. Then I established what average best represented the present rate of bleed or sandbagging. With specific percentages based on historic data we could speculate, with a reasonable degree of confidence, how much any project managers’ WIP reporting likely varied, and in what direction.

易于制作的修复

我们需要的是一个即时的可靠修复程序，可以易于制作，并使我们能够实现提高WIP会计准确性的最初目标。实施的解决方案必须导致现有过程的最小破坏。承包商的才华横溢的项目经理以盈利的工作感到自豪，我犹豫不决地批评他们的报告，因为它可能弊大于利。

The resolution was easy to implement because the field reporting processes and the procedure for inputting the reported data by accounting staff didn't have to change. Instead, we developed a system to automatically adjust for the average profit bleed or sandbagging. When the contractor’s chief financial officer or his cohort accessed the WIP information, the number was displayed in the original amounts reported but also automatically discounted for profit bleed or increased for sandbagging by the historic factor associated with each project manager. The corrected amounts could then be used in compiling improved and more accurate interim and year-end financial statements.

My advice to the contractors was that secrecy is seldom appropriate. So the contractor informed each project manager about the adjustment made to their reported WIP from time to time. The project managers showed little concern and they even seemed to appreciate what was being done and that the solution required no additional effort from them. And that is understandable when you consider that change is always difficult.

Thomas C. Schleifer博士是亚利桑那州立大学的周转专家和前教授。他是担保人和承包商的顾问，可以通过他的博客与letstalkbusiness.net.