What columns are on a WIP schedule?

A WIP schedule carries one row per active project and, across the columns, walks from the contract to the billing position. The core fields are the contract value (including approved change orders), the estimated total cost, the cost incurred to date, the percent complete (usually cost-to-cost), the revenue earned to date (percent complete times contract value), the amount actually billed to date, and the resulting over- or underbilling, which is billed minus earned. Most schedules also show the estimated gross profit and the profit earned to date. Read across a row and you see the whole financial story of one job; read down the billing column and you see the company's total over- or underbilled position.

Who uses the WIP schedule and why does it matter so much?

The construction CFO or controller runs it, and the surety and the bank rely on it. For the contractor it is the truest internal read of financial health, because it exposes jobs that look profitable on the invoices but are actually underwater, or profit that has been pulled forward by overbilling and will reverse later. The surety uses it to judge bonding capacity, and the lender uses it to assess the loan, so an accurate WIP schedule is not just internal hygiene, it directly affects how much work the contractor can take on and borrow against. A sloppy or manipulated WIP schedule is one of the clearest early warnings of a contractor in trouble.

What is the difference between overbilled and underbilled, and is one bad?

Overbilled means the contractor has billed more than it has earned to date, so billings exceed revenue; underbilled means it has earned more than it has billed. Overbilling is common and often deliberate, a cash-flow advantage from billing ahead of cost, but it is a liability on the balance sheet, billings in excess of costs, that unwinds as the earned revenue catches up to what was billed, so heavy overbilling can mask a job that is really losing money. Underbilling ties up the contractor's own cash in work it has not yet invoiced and is usually a sign of slow or missed billings. Neither is inherently good or bad in moderation; large or unexplained swings in either direction are the warning sign.

Construction Glossary · Financial & Accounting

The WIPSchedule

One row per job, from contract to billing position. It is the report that tells a contractor, a surety, and a bank what the backlog is really worth.

Definition

A work-in-progress (WIP) schedule is the construction financial report, usually run monthly, that reconciles for each active project the contract value, estimated cost, cost incurred to date, percent complete, revenue earned, and amount billed, and shows whether each job is overbilled or underbilled. It is the core management report a construction CFO, surety, and lender rely on to see the true financial position of the backlog, project by project.

Earned versus billed is the whole point

At 50 percent complete our $12.0M job has earned $6.0M but billed only $5.0M, so it is underbilled $1.0M, cash tied up in work not yet invoiced. The reverse, billed above earned, would be overbilled.

One project, walked across the row

Every WIP column follows from the one before it. Contract and cost give percent complete; percent complete gives earned revenue; earned minus billed gives the over/under position.

Column	Our project	From
Contract value	$12.0M	Contract + approved COs
Estimated total cost	$10.8M	Budget / forecast
Cost to date	$5.4M	Pay applications
Percent complete	50%	Cost ÷ est. cost
Revenue earned	$6.0M	% × contract
Billed to date	$5.0M	Pay applications
Position	Underbilled $1.0M	Billed − earned

The last row is over/under billing; the earned-revenue step is revenue recognition.

How POD relates to the WIP schedule

Every input a WIP schedule needs already lives in POD and is individually authoritative: the contract value with approved change orders, the cost to date and amounts billed from your pay applications, and the budgeted cost of the work. Rolling those into the earned-revenue and over/under-billed figures of a full WIP schedule is POD's documented revenue-recognition methodology, a defined layer that sits beside the live EVM engine. POD does not compute the WIP schedule’s earned-revenue or over/under-billed outputs as live figures today, and it is not your accounting system of record. What it offers is one reconciled source for the inputs the schedule is built from.

Construction WIP schedule guide

Frequently asked questions

The WIP is one of three lenses

Earned value tracks performance, the budget tracks cost, and the WIP schedule tracks revenue against billing. Each answers a different question about the same job.

Revenue Recognition Back to the Glossary