Guide
The Friday look
Most jobs don't go wrong in a week. They go wrong over two months, in small amounts, while everyone is busy. Twenty minutes on a Friday catches nearly all of it — as long as you look at the same things in the same order, and actually do something about what you see.
Why Friday, and why before the invoice
The numbers only change what you do at two moments: before you send an invoice, and before you price a change. Friday sits in front of both. Look on Monday and you'll read it as history; look Friday and you're still deciding what goes on the bill and what to tell a client who asks on Saturday morning.
Twenty minutes. If it's taking an hour, you're fixing things rather than looking, and the fixing is a separate job.
The order
Work from the whole business down to the one job that needs you, not the other way round. Four passes:
1. What needs you
Start with the list of things the week has thrown up: a budget line gone over, a bill overdue, a change order the client has sat on, hours that never landed on a job. In Millo that's Needs you on the Today screen, with the money beside each one. Everything on that list is either a decision or a two-minute fix. Do the two-minute fixes now; the decisions get written down and dated, because an undecided thing at the top of the list next Friday is how six weeks go past.
2. The jobs worth watching
You don't need to read every job every week. You need the ones moving in the wrong direction — the worst first. Millo calls that Jobs to watch. On a normal week it's one or two, and if it's suddenly five, something happened in the business rather than on the jobs.
3. The four numbers, on the jobs that came up
For each one: contract value, billed, not billed yet, left to bill. Read them in that order and the story tells itself — what the job is worth today, what you've invoiced, what's done and waiting to go on a bill, and what's left in the job after both. If left to bill is shrinking faster than the job is finishing, you've found this week's problem. What each number means is its own page.
4. The lines inside the one job that's off
A job that looks fine overall can be hiding a line forty per cent over, paid for by another line that came in under. Open the budget lines on the job that bothered you in pass three and find which one it is. It's almost always one line, and naming it is most of the fix.
What to do with what you find
- A line over with the work finished: it's spent. Note it and price the next one like that better. Don't reopen it.
- A line over with the work half done: this is the one that matters. Decide this week whether it's a change order, a cost that landed on the wrong job, or a real overrun — and if it's a real overrun, the client conversation is now rather than at the end.
- Not billed yet, large: that's your money sitting out in the rain. Either it goes on this cycle's invoice or there's a reason, and the reason should be a sentence you'd be happy saying out loud.
- Hours missing: chase them before the invoice, not after. Hours added after a bill has gone are the single most common cause of an invoice you can't defend.
- Nothing wrong anywhere: stop. A quiet week is a result, not a sign you haven't looked hard enough.
The habit part
The order matters less than the sameness. Doing it at the same time, in the same order, is what turns it from an audit you dread into a look you do while the kettle boils. Two or three weeks in, you'll notice you can feel a job going wrong a week before the numbers say so — that's the routine working, not instinct.
And do it even on the weeks where you're sure everything's fine. Those are the weeks it's for.
How Millo does it
Millo's Today screen is built around this: Needs you at the top with the money attached, Jobs to watch worst first, and every job carrying its four numbers and its budget lines, worked out from the hours the crew log, the bills you enter and the invoices you send. It's job-costing software that runs on your own office computer, bought once, with no subscription.