5 numbers every AEC director should check weekly (but probably isn’t)

For most AEC directors, Monday mornings follow a familiar pattern: check the pipeline, review a few project updates, clear urgent emails, and move on with the week. Yet despite the wealth of dashboards and reports at their fingertips, many still lack clear, up-to-date visibility into the few key numbers that truly drive project success and profitability.

It’s not that the data doesn’t exist, but too often, the right figures are hidden in spreadsheets, scattered across legacy tools, or reports that only appear once the month’s already over. Without easy access to those figures, even seasoned directors may end up relying on instinct to make decisions, when they could be making confident decisions backed by metrics that matter.

Here are five numbers worth checking every single week, and how gaining a real-time understanding of these with an operations & intelligence platform can transform how you run your business.

‍

1. Project Gross Margin (to Date)

Gross margin isn’t just a number, it’s the clearest signal of whether your projects are delivering the profit you priced in. It tells you, in real time, whether the job you thought was “safe” is quietly bleeding cash. 

The problem is, margin erosion happens quietly: a few untracked hours, a small change in scope, a forgotten variation order. Leave it unmonitored and those invisible leaks become permanent losses. 

By the time it shows up in month-end accounts, it’s too late to recover. Over time, that invisibility distorts your forecasts, misleads leadership, and normalizes underperformance. Leaving you with projects that look fine on paper, but are actually eating away at your firm-wide profitability.

How to track it: A good platform lets you see live margin by project, factoring in timesheets, expenses, and changes as they happen. No more waiting for finance to reconcile the numbers. With CMap, margin is visible at a glance, so you can catch issues early and step in before costs spiral.

‍

2. Unbilled Work in Progress (WIP)

Unbilled WIP is where profit hides and cashflow stalls. It’s the work you’ve done but haven’t yet billed, and it grows quietly when project managers delay invoicing or when approvals crawl through internal bottlenecks. 

Every day that work sits unbilled, you’re lending your clients money, interest-free, while your own cash position weakens. The longer it lingers, the harder it becomes to collect, because clients forget, challenge, or dispute old work. 

In the end, that “asset” on your balance sheet turns into a write-off. Unchecked WIP also masks process issues: weak communication between finance and project teams, unclear billing ownership, or systems that make it too easy to delay. Track it weekly, and you keep your revenue real and your cash working for you.

How to track it: Automated WIP dashboards show exactly what’s ready to bill, what’s overdue, and what’s at risk. CMap pulls this data from project delivery and timesheets, so you can flag issues with PMs and keep cash moving.

‍

‍3. Resource Utilisation

Utilisation is where your people and your profit intersect. When it’s low, you’re paying for idle capacity; when it’s too high, you’re burning out your team and setting yourself up for errors and turnover. 

Most firms look at utilisation monthly, by which time the damage is done. Weekly tracking tells you whether teams are working at target levels, where workloads are unbalanced, and whether you’re deploying your skills effectively across projects. 

Without that visibility, leaders are flying blind - making hiring, pricing, and resourcing decisions on gut feel. The result is a cycle of feast and famine: idle benches one month, overworked staff the next, and a constant drag on both morale and margin.

How to track it: You need a system that records planned vs. actuals, not just theoretical capacity. CMap’s resource dashboards let you drill down into the data, spot imbalances, and make informed decisions about hiring, redeployment, or workload smoothing, all before small problems become major ones.

‍

4. Project Forecasted Completion (vs. Plan)

Every AEC project slips, it’s what you do about it that defines your firm. Forecasted completion is your early warning system, showing you which jobs are drifting before they trigger a domino effect across your portfolio. 

Missed milestones don’t just hurt one project; they delay invoicing, tie up staff who should be starting new work, and strain client trust. By the time you notice slippage in a monthly review, the recovery window has closed. 

Over time, that lack of foresight turns your operations into a perpetual firefight, reactive instead of planned, with teams stretched thin and clients losing faith. Weekly visibility keeps you in control of timelines, capacity, and credibility.

How to track it: Live project tracking lets you see expected completion dates against plan, flagging anything that’s slipping or at risk. With CMap, this isn’t a manual exercise, it’s baked into the workflow, so project status updates are visible to everyone who needs them.

‍

5. Aged Debtors (by Project and Client)

Cash is oxygen for your business, and aged debt quietly cuts off the supply. Every overdue invoice locks up cash you need to fund payroll, invest in growth, or simply breathe easy. 

But old debt isn’t just a finance issue, it’s a relationship and process issue. Late payments often point to delivery disputes, unclear documentation, or slow internal follow-up. 

When leadership only sees debtor reports monthly, small delays snowball into serious exposure. The longer invoices sit unpaid, the harder they are to recover, and the more time your senior team wastes chasing instead of leading. Over time, chronic aged debt erodes trust, weakens resilience, and starves even profitable firms of the liquidity they need to grow.

How to track it: A system that links billing, project delivery, and client data gives you instant access to who owes what, for how long, and why. CMap’s dashboards surface this data automatically—no more waiting for finance to build a manual report.

‍

Building the Habit (Without Breaking Your Week)

Most directors know these numbers matter. The challenge is making them visible, accurate, and easy to check - week in, week out - without adding hours to your workload or relying on heroics from the finance team.

That’s where purpose-built operations & intelligence platforms like CMap come in. Instead of wrestling with spreadsheets or waiting for outdated month-end reports, you get a single source of truth - real-time, project-specific, and accessible to everyone who needs it. Giving you fewer surprises, faster interventions, and a team that’s always steering by the right numbers.

‍

Make the Numbers Work for You

It’s easy to talk about working smarter, not harder. In practice, it comes down to tracking the numbers that matter - consistently, and with enough lead time to act.  Too many AEC firms still run on lagging indicators and gut feel, missing the small warning signs that add up to big gaps in profit, cashflow, and team performance. If you’re serious about getting a handle on project margin, cashflow, and utilisation, with less admin and more clarity, it’s time to rethink how you track and use your data. 

CMap was built for exactly this challenge. Book a demo and see how the right numbers, delivered at the right time, can transform the way you run your firm. 

‍