A budget report showing 60% of committed cost spent doesn't say whether 60% of the work is actually in the ground. Cost and physical progress drift apart constantly — front-loaded material buys, back-loaded labour-heavy finishes — and a firm that only tracks the dollar side is flying on half the instrument panel.
Key takeaways
A budget line shows committed cost the moment a subcontract or purchase order is signed — long before the material is installed. A firm that reads “committed” as “done” is measuring the wrong thing: Our companion piece covers the cost-commitment side of that tracking specifically; installed quantity is the physical complement to it, and the two need to be read together, not interchangeably.
The gap shows up hardest on jobs with front-loaded procurement — long-lead equipment ordered and paid for months before it's set — where the cost report looks well ahead of schedule while the physical job is exactly on pace, or behind it.
It's worth being direct about a limitation rather than assuming a feature exists: Procore's own documentation confirms one mainstream field platform imports a schedule baseline from Primavera P6 read-only, stating plainly that changes to the schedule “must be performed using Oracle's Primavera P6 Professional Project Management software,” and that “only one Baseline Start is supported” once imported.
That means earned-value tracking — comparing planned value, earned value and actual cost on a single curve — isn't something the field platform does natively. A firm doing that comparison is building it themselves, from the platform's cost and quantity data exported into a separate calculation, not toggling a built-in report.
Comparing installed quantity against budget only works if both sides are coded the same way. One platform's own documentation confirms the default cost codes align with CSI MasterFormat, structured in two tiers — division-level groupings and individual cost-code line items beneath each — rather than a flat, uncategorised list.
Cost type is a separate dimension layered on top of the code: the platform's own documentation names seven defaults — Equipment, Labor, Materials, Other, Owner Cost, Commitments, and Professional Services — which can't be deleted, though a firm can add custom types alongside them. A quantity entry that isn't tagged to the same code and type structure as the budget line it's meant to track can't actually be compared against it — the two records have to share a coding scheme before they can share a chart.
Quantity data has to originate somewhere in the field, and the daily log is the natural point of capture: it names Quantities as a distinct category for “tracking information about the amount of materials that are used on a given day,” which our companion piece covers building a consistent standard for across every supervisor on a job.
Where that daily entry isn't kept consistently, “percent complete” on a progress report becomes a judgment call by whoever's asked, rather than a number built up from actual counted quantities — concrete cubic metres poured, linear metres of duct run, square metres of drywall hung. A judgment-call percentage is defensible right up until someone asks how it was calculated.
Neither cost-committed nor quantity-installed is the right number on its own — the useful signal is the gap between them, tracked over time rather than checked once. A job where committed cost and installed quantity move together, week over week, is behaving as expected. A job where the gap widens is telling a specific story worth investigating: either procurement is running ahead of the crew's pace, or the crew is outrunning what's actually been ordered and committed, which is its own risk.
Building that comparison monthly, alongside the rest of a job's financial reporting, is what turns installed-quantity tracking from a field curiosity into something a project manager actually uses to catch a job going sideways before the numbers make it obvious on their own.
Quantity tracking fails in practice more often from adoption than from design — a supervisor who sees the daily log as a chore fills the Quantities field last, roughly, or skips it on a busy day. The categories exist whether or not they're used well.
Tying the quantity entry to something the crew already needs — a running count that feeds their own progress reporting, or a number the supervisor already has to tally for a delivery reconciliation — makes the entry useful to the person filling it in, not just to the office reading it later, which is generally what makes a habit like this stick past the first few weeks of a new job.
A worked example
A drywall package is budgeted at 40,000 square metres for $620,000, coded under a single cost code and the Materials and Labor cost types. At the midpoint of the schedule, the cost report shows $340,000 committed — roughly 55% of budget — which reads as slightly ahead of the 50% schedule midpoint.
The daily-log Quantities entries tell a different story: 16,000 square metres actually hung, or 40% of the physical scope. The gap is procurement, not progress — board and stud material for the full package was ordered and committed early to lock in pricing, while the labour-heavy hanging and taping work is still catching up. Read on cost alone, the job looks ahead. Read on installed quantity, it's ten percentage points behind — the number that actually predicts when the crew finishes.
Not as a built-in comparison, in at least one mainstream platform: its own documentation confirms schedule changes have to be made in Primavera P6 itself and only imported read-only, with a single supported Baseline Start. Earned-value tracking has to be assembled from the platform's cost and quantity data, not pulled from a native report.
Usually procurement timing — material ordered and committed early to lock in price or lead time shows up as committed cost immediately, while the labour to install it hasn't happened yet. Our companion piece covers tracking that committed-cost side specifically.
The same cost code and cost type the budget line uses. One platform's documentation confirms the default cost codes follow CSI MasterFormat in a two-tier structure, and cost type is a separate, seven-value default field layered on top — a quantity entry tagged to a different scheme than its budget line can't be meaningfully compared to it.
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