Practical Construction Accounting and Financial Management (Purdue Handbooks in Building Construction)

Practical Construction Accounting and Financial Management provides instructions, training, exercises, and examples of the fundamentals that successful construction contractors must master: the ability to capture, summarize, analyze, and forecast operation data to be better informed when making project and business decisions. Typically, a project manager is not involved with data entry but is a source of data collection. Often the project manager's lack of understanding of accounting systems creates a situation where the project manager's role in the data retrieval and entry is compromised. This compromise results in poor decisions being made by the project and company managers due to inaccurate and untimely data. This book provides current and future construction professionals with an awareness of fundamental accounting concepts and financial principles to successfully manage the finances of construction companies, including accurately pricing projects based on actual overhead and profit recovery needs, successfully controlling the cost to operate a construction company through the comparison between company budgets and actual financial statements, and proactively forecasting cash needs before falling into a potential cash trap that could force the company into bankruptcy.