According to a Dodge Data & Analytics report, 99% of speciality contractors experience margin erosion on projects, with profit margins shrinking by an average of 5% to 7% during construction. On civil and infrastructure projects like highways and pipelines, margins bleed out by the foot out in the field long before the numbers ever reach the office.
When work is heavily driven by labor, equipment fleets, and bulk materials allocated across long distances, small field slip-ups quickly add up to heavy losses. To keep what you earn, you have to replace slow milestone reports with real-time tracking.
The Root Cause: Mismatched Metrics and Slow Field Data
Traditional project management software treats jobs like static blocks, which fails to track and adapt to continuous, moving field work. Foremen measure daily progress across the right-of-way in installed quantities, crew output, and daily truck counts, while the office tracks production performance through monthly billing cycles and cost codes.
This disconnect creates a dangerous timeline gap. For Faulconer Construction, a heavy civil and site development contractor based in Virginia, delays in cost data were a persistent risk.
“I remember printing six copies of every submittal and hand-delivering them to the GC’s office,” says Mindy Colden, COO of Faulconer Construction. “We were still hand delivering and emailing timecards every week, which meant it could take almost three weeks before we had cost feedback on completed work.” (Read Faulconer Construction’s story.)
Scott Keyes, VP of Concrete Operations at Fessler & Bowman, experienced the same manual bottlenecks. "To check material quantities against your production rates, you had to wait a week or two for that cycle to go through project management and finance,” Scott says. “You were always lagging — it was the end of the month before you could see how you were doing." (Read Fessler & Bowman’s story.)
That's the real cost of this gap: By the time you find out you're bleeding margin, the crew that caused it has already moved three miles down the corridor. In comparison, 92% of expert Procore users report that the platform helped reduce rework due to improved stakeholder communication.
The Solution: Procore’s Field-First Architecture
To stem the profit loss that occurs in the gap between the field and the office, operational performance and financial management must run on the exact same data. Together, Procore’s Resource Management and Cost Management solutions create a unified system that seamlessly connects field operations to the office.
By linking daily tracking of labor, equipment, and materials directly to budget cost codes, teams get immediate visibility into production costs as work happens along the corridor – reducing blind spots and helping to protect margins before variances compound.
"Having all of our information in one place lends itself to transparency and accountability. Everyone on the team has access to the same data."
- Mindy Colden, COO, Faulconer Construction
Procore connects field metrics directly to budget cost codes, automatically translating raw measurements like linear feet or cubic yards straight into budgeted labor-hours. Foremen log installed quantities right from their mobile devices, giving them instant visibility into daily burn rates and cost variances. In fact, trade contractors experienced with Procore report a 21% to 30% jump in field productivity.
Connecting the Field Directly to Your Budget
Linking daily field work directly to your financial tracking bridges the gap between estimating assumptions and the reality on the ground. On civil projects, your biggest financial risks are tied up in labor, machinery, and materials. By tracking these three resources inside Procore, project teams minimize double data entry and reduce guesswork.
With real-time field inputs, project managers no longer have to wonder whether they are making money today. Instead of waiting on a monthly accounting report to reveal an overrun, real-time visibility lets supervisors reallocate crews, cut out idle equipment time, or fix sequencing mistakes while the work is in motion.
Tying field data directly to dollars is one of the reasons why 95% of expert-level users report that profit margins improved after adopting Procore.
Fessler & Bowman implemented real-time unit-cost tracking with Procore to dynamically track man-hour dollars and units against commitments, replacing monthly postmortems.
"I couldn't imagine not being on a digital platform that integrates the field and financials. The risk is not knowing your true cost, not foreseeing where you're at, and not knowing when to pivot when something isn't working."
- Scott Keyes, VP of Concrete Operations at Fessler & Bowman
Control the Field, Secure Your Profits
On sprawling linear projects, letting field inefficiencies repeat day after day creates a snowball of lost cash that you can’t recover.
But protecting profit margins is just the first win. The real impact, according to Fessler & Bowman’s VP of Concrete Operations, is the freedom to stop putting out fires – and start planning long-term growth.
"Four years ago, I was a lot more hands-on in the field dealing with day-to-day issues,” Scott Keyes says. “My focus now has really changed to three, four, five, or ten years down the road. We're looking out for business opportunities, how we're going to scale, how we're developing our people."
Ready to stop waiting on end-of-month accounting? Book a demo today to see how Procore helps you take control of your field operations, protect your cash flow, and keep the money you earn.
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