By Greg Allan, tradesman and creator of Data First Coaching
Why does a site cut still come in over cost even when the quote looked right?
Because the quote priced machine hours, fuel and tipping fees against an estimate made before the dig started, and once the excavator is on site, every hour of digging, every float between sites, every servicing stop and every breakdown either gets recorded against that job or it does not. If it does not, the cost does not vanish. It lands in overhead instead, and the job still looks fine on the invoice while the margin underneath it has already gone.
Most earthmoving contractors do not have a people problem here, they have a system that does not catch the cost at the point it happens. An operator moving from a site cut in the morning to trenching on a drainage job in the afternoon is not going to remember to log fuel use or float time between the two unless the system in front of them asks for it right there, at that moment, not at the end of the week.
Where does the money actually go when fuel, tipping fees and float times are not tracked?
It goes into overhead, spread thinly across every job instead of charged against the one that caused it. A tipping fee that has gone up since the quote was priced, a dry hire rate that has moved, a breakdown that cost half a day of servicing, none of these show up as a loss on that specific site cut. They show up later as a margin across the whole earthmoving business that is thinner than it should be, with nobody able to point to why.
This is the same pattern as a rising material cost or labour rate in any trade: when a cost input moves, it comes straight off the margin unless the pricing is updated to reflect it. For an earthmoving contractor, that cost input is fuel, tipping fees, dry hire and wet hire rates, and a wet day that leaves plant sitting idle still costing hire or finance while it earns nothing. A wet day, a breakdown, or a float between two sites that was never costed into the quote all behave the same way once they are not tracked. They quietly erode the one number that tells the business whether it is actually making money.
What should your earthmoving system actually capture, and why?
Your system should capture machine hours, fuel, servicing, tipping dockets, float time and any swap between dry hire and wet hire against the job it happened on, at the time it happened, not reconstructed from memory at the end of the month. That is what turns a site cut, a trenching job or a bulk earthworks contract from a guess into a number you can actually trust.
Building this before you hand it to operators and office staff matters, because systemising the process yourself exposes the gaps in how you already do it. If you cannot clearly say when a float between sites should be logged, or how a dry hire swap to wet hire mid-job gets picked up, your crew will not know either, and they will each fill the gap their own way, usually the way a previous boss taught them. That inconsistency is what makes a civil client's job look profitable and a builder's job on the same crew look like it lost money, when the real difference was never the work, it was what got recorded.
Should you build your own system or keep renting the software everyone else uses?
Some off-the-shelf fleet tracking, job costing or invoicing tools genuinely suit parts of an earthmoving business, and the right answer is whatever your own data shows is actually being used and actually catching the cost. The question is not whether to cancel everything, it is whether the tools you are paying for were built for how your jobs run, or for every trade at once.
An earthmoving contractor quoting a site cut for a builder, trenching for a drainage contractor and a bulk earthworks package for a civil client is running three different jobs with three different cost shapes, three different tipping arrangements and three different ways the customer expects to be invoiced. A system shaped around your own jobs and your own customers, rather than a generic template, is a choice you can make once your own numbers show you where the generic tool is leaving gaps.
What changes when AI agents take on logging and chasing for your earthmoving business?
An AI agent is software that does a job the way you would do it yourself, using your prices, your wording and your rules, instead of you or your office doing it by hand every time. For an earthmoving contractor, that can mean an agent chasing an operator for machine hours and fuel figures before the next job starts, or flagging a tipping fee that has moved since the last quote was priced.
This matters because it takes non-billable office work, the chasing, the data entry, the reminders, off you and your team, so the time goes back onto customers, quoting and the crew on site. Working data first means every decision about pricing, margin or which jobs to chase starts from what is actually happening on your sites this week, not what the business looked like when the quote went out.
How does Data First Coaching approach this?
Data First Coaching starts from your own numbers through the Trade Business Intelligence, not from a description of how your earthmoving business runs. It looks at where machine hours, fuel, tipping fees and float time are actually landing against each job, because that is usually where a margin problem that looks like a pricing problem actually starts. Greg Allan has said it plainly: when a cost input rises, “that directly comes off of your profit margin” unless the system catches it. The how, the actual build, is worked through inside the Academy, with members, because the Trade Business Intelligence is powered by every member, for every member who is open minded, innovative and willing to share what they learn.
