Baseline
120 jobs, walked from the quote to the invoice — because there is no report that shows this.
- Quoted19 Apr 2025$69,146
- Ordered26 Apr 2025
- Shipped5 Jun 2025
- Extra work — site-fit reworknever invoiced$7,953
- Invoiced — INV-2025-0271912 Jun 2025$69,146
The work is on the job. The invoice is the job's own value and nothing else — the extra never became a line, so nobody was ever going to be asked to pay for it.
These are the ones the trace turned up: 4 of 120 carried work that was done and never reached an invoice. Open one and the trail is the same every time — the work is on the job, and it is not on the bill.
And for contrast, one that worked. Same kind of extra, priced when it happened, on the invoice.
Nobody's report shows this, because the work that never got billed never got a record. We read it off a handful of jobs, start to finish — which is what we'd do on yours.
This is what next year looks like, not what last year owes you. The jobs that already shipped are gone; the point is that the next ones aren't.
Where it leaks
4 of 120 is a rate. What it costs depends on how many jobs you ship.
sampled — 4 of 120 jobs traced
Each amount is rounded to the dollar on its own, so dividing the two as printed lands a few cents off this one. It is computed from the amounts before rounding.
sampled — 4 of 120 jobs traced
The exact figure is beside it; the headline is rounded down to the step, never to the nearest — an estimate of what someone else is losing is the last number that should be flattered. Each of the three amounts in that line is rounded to the dollar on its own, so working the line as printed lands a dollar or two above the exact figure, which is computed from the amounts before rounding.
Find a fifth of these jobs, or only three, and the figure above moves by that much. It is what one job of movement costs — not a bound on the answer, and not a range: the real spread is wider than this, and a trace of this size cannot pin the figure down. Narrowing it takes a much longer trace, or the thing the last beat is about — a process that counts it for you. This one is rounded up, because an uncertainty rounded down is an uncertainty understated.
The fix
One rule, and it applies to the next job rather than the last one.
A job can't close with work on it that nobody priced.
forward run rate
The same estimate as the beat above, carrying the same width. The rule changes the rate; it does not make anyone more certain about what last year's was.
A forward run rate: the twelve months after the rule goes live, not the twelve behind you.
The job won't close until someone prices it.
J-2025-02719
Fairwind Turbines
- The job as ordered$69,146
- Extra work — site-fit reworkno price—
One item on this job has no price yet.
The price is written in advance and stored with the example data — a person sets it, and nothing is generated while you watch.
Holding it
How you would know — and why nobody knows today.
0.00–9.11 % of jobs
Limits from 12 periods. No lower limit is drawn: the computed one falls past the floor this measure cannot cross, and a period sitting at that floor is the target rather than something to investigate. Beneath: how much it moved from one period to the next.
The process makes the mistake impossible, instead of asking people to be careful.
Every month sits inside the band, so no month is the problem — this is what the process does when it is left alone. The band is wide because the numbers behind it are small: at this volume a month can double and still be ordinary, which means a careful-be-careful campaign would be invisible here. A rule that takes it to nothing would not be.
The months are close enough in size to sit on one chart — the thinnest shipped 137 jobs and the fattest 154 — which is what makes a share comparable from one to the next.
There is no second line here, because there is no "after" yet. The month the rule goes live is where the band gets recomputed — and until the new run is long enough to set its own, it gets measured against this one.
And the part worth saying out loud: on your books this chart does not exist yet. The work that never got priced never got a record, which is why the figure two beats up came off a hand trace of 120 jobs and carried the width it did. The rule is what creates the record. You get the measure because you installed the thing being measured — not the other way round.