Construction Budgeting Basics: From Bid to Final Cost Report

A construction budget starts as the winning bid's cost structure and evolves throughout the project into a living plan that tracks what's been spent, what's committed, and what's left to spend. Keeping the budget current is what makes job cost reporting meaningful — outdated budgets produce variance reports that nobody trusts. Here is how construction budgets work at each stage of a project and the discipline that keeps them useful.