Forecast Final Cost: the one number every contractor should see daily

Ask a project team what the job will finally cost and you will usually get last month's answer: the number from the previous cost report, assembled over days, out of date before it was circulated. Between reports, the project keeps committing money. That gap — between when a commitment is made and when its effect is visible — is where cost control fails.

One definition, always current

Forecast Final Cost has a simple definition: total commitments plus uncommitted exposure. Everything the project has promised to pay, plus everything it still expects to promise. Neither half is exotic. What matters is when they are computed. Calculated monthly in a workbook, FFC is a post-mortem. Calculated continuously from the live ledger, it is an instrument.

Why the workbook version fails

• Commitments live in contracts and purchase orders; exposure lives in the BOQ; actuals live in the accounts. Reassembling them by hand each month invites omissions.
• The person assembling the number is often the person under pressure about the number.
• By the time an overrun is visible, the commitments that caused it are signed.

What changes when the number is live

When document extraction, cost coding and reconciliation feed one ledger, FFC recalculates the moment a commitment lands. Overruns surface as trends while there is still time to act: renegotiate a package, resequence work, escalate a variation honestly. The month-end meeting stops being a reveal and becomes a decision.

This is the forecasting core of Costwright: a gauge that moves when the project moves. The gauge is not the achievement. The achievement is that nobody has to assemble it.