The Key to Smarter Project Tracking: Job Costing in Your Software

When it comes to managing capital projects or tracking renovation costs across your real estate portfolio, having visibility into project budgets, expenses, and profitability is critical. That’s where Job Costing—a powerful feature in most leading property management software systems like Yardi—comes into play.

Yet, in our experience, many property management companies either underutilize or completely overlook the job cost module. That means they're missing out on deeper project insights, better cost control, and cleaner financial reporting.

If you’ve been relying on spreadsheets, general ledgers, or workarounds to manage project costs, keep reading.

What Is Job Costing, and Why Does It Matter?

Job Costing allows property managers, owners, and developers to track costs by specific projects or “jobs.” Whether you’re overseeing a full-scale development, tenant improvements, or building-wide renovations, this module helps you:

• Track budgets vs. actuals in real time

• Allocate costs to the correct units, properties, or departments

• Streamline invoice approval and vendor payments

• Generate detailed reporting for stakeholders and auditors

• Avoid costly overruns and missed deadlines

In short, it helps you stay organized and accountable—especially when dealing with multiple vendors, phases, and properties. 

Signs You Need Job Costing Set Up Properly

• You’re manually tracking capital projects in Excel

• Your finance team is constantly cleaning up cost misallocations

• You struggle to justify project spend during budget reviews

• Your team has a hard time seeing the full picture until a project is complete

If any of these sound familiar, your system might not be working for you—yet.

Setting Up Job Costing the Right Way

Setting up the Job Cost module isn’t just about turning it on. A proper setup requires:

• Chart of accounts alignment

• Project structure and phase configuration

• Cost code hierarchy planning

• Workflow integration for requisitions and purchase orders

• Clear security and permissions settings

• Reporting customization to match internal requirements 

Every organization is different, and job cost configuration should reflect your unique processes and reporting needs.

Why Work with a Job Costing Specialist?

As consultants specializing in Yardi system implementations, configuration, and reporting, we’ve helped real estate companies streamline their capital project tracking and gain actionable insights using the Job Cost module. We take the time to understand your operational flow and design a setup that works for your team—not just your software.

Whether you’re implementing Job Cost for the first time or need to fix a setup that’s causing more confusion than clarity, we can help.