Quote the next job from the hours of the last one
Most engineering estimates are written from memory, and memory forgets the review cycles, the rework and the close-out. The hours you already recorded do not.
Ask an engineer how long a site survey takes and you will get an honest answer: the time it took the last time it went well. That is the estimate that goes into the quote. Then the job runs over, and nobody is quite sure why, because every individual task "took about as long as it should".
The answer is usually already written down. If your team records time against the same phases you quote with, every finished job is a record of what that kind of work actually costs. This post is about reading that record before you write the next quote.
Why estimates from memory run short
Memory keeps the work and drops the overhead around it. The parts that go missing are remarkably consistent:
- Review and comment cycles. The first draft is remembered; the third round of client comments is not.
- Rework. Correcting something is filed mentally under the original task, so it never shows up as its own line.
- Coordination. Calls, site access, chasing information - real hours that belong to no deliverable.
- Close-out. Final issue, as-built updates and handover packs, which happen after everybody has moved on.
None of these is a mistake by the person estimating. They are simply the parts of a job nobody pictures when they imagine doing it.
Record time the way you quote
Recorded hours only help an estimate if they can be lined up against it. If the quote is built from phases - survey, design, review, close-out - the timesheet needs the same phases. Hours booked to a single job-wide line tell you the job ran over; hours booked by phase tell you where.
It is worth one more step: give each phase a budget on the day the job is planned, even a rough one. A budget is what turns a pile of hours into a comparison.
Compare budget with actual, phase by phase
When a job closes, put the budget and the actual hours side by side for each phase. A made-up example of what that tends to look like:
| Phase | Budget (hours) | Actual (hours) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Site survey | 40 | 38 | -2 |
| Design | 120 | 131 | +11 |
| Review and client comments | 20 | 46 | +26 |
| Close-out and handover | 10 | 24 | +14 |
Read across one job and the obvious conclusion is "design ran a little over". Read across five similar jobs and the pattern is usually somewhere else: the same one or two phases overrun every time, by roughly the same proportion. That proportion is the most useful number you can bring to the next quote.
Three questions to ask of the comparison
- Which phases ran over on most jobs, not just this one?
- Is the overrun a fixed number of hours or a share of the phase? Review cycles often scale with the size of the design; close-out often does not.
- Was the work in the quote at all? A phase with no budget cannot run over - it just quietly costs money.
Keep what you sold apart from what you plan to spend
A job is quoted before its phases are planned in detail, so the job total and the sum of the phase budgets are often different numbers. That gap is information, not an error. A 200-hour quote broken into phases that add up to 260 hours is worth seeing on the day it is planned, not three months later when the invoice goes out short.
Watch it while the job runs, without stopping the record
The comparison is most useful while there is still time to act. A warning when a phase reaches, say, 75 percent of its budget gives the project lead a chance to talk to the client about scope before the hours are gone.
How ReliTime handles this
In ReliTime a job is broken into phases and tasks, and time is recorded against the task. A job can carry a budget in hours and in money, each phase and task can carry its own hours budget, and the jobs screen shows budget against booked hours at every level - including the gap between the job total and the sum of its phases. A warning appears when a booking takes a level past the threshold you set, and the hours are still recorded. When you start a new job from a template, the phase and task budgets come with it, so the next estimate can begin from the last one instead of a blank page.
Whatever tool you use, the habit is the same: record time the way you quote, compare them when the job closes, and let the pattern - not memory - set the next number.