Free 24-page guide for development executives
21 tips • 5 pillars • 1 action per tip
by Greg Daniele, CPA
Most development companies run on a stack of disconnected spreadsheets that only agree with each other once a month, and by then the cost overrun is already poured in concrete.
This guide gives you 21 operational fixes you can start on this week.
So your team can stop looking through the rearview mirror and start looking through the windshield.
If your controller spends more hours assembling the
report than anyone spends acting on it, the problem
is architecture, not effort.
Real estate development is one of the hardest businesses in the world to
account for. Every project is its own legal entity with its own lender, its own
equity structure, and its own cost codes. General-purpose accounting software
was built for companies that sell one thing repeatedly, so your team fills
the gap with side spreadsheets, manual crosswalks, and a monthly scramble to
make the numbers agree.
That is the cost of flying blind, and it shows up in three places you can
measure: salary hours burned on copy and paste, draw packages that take
days instead of an hour, and budget variances that surface at 80% completion
when nothing can be done about them.
As Greg writes in the book, the problem is almost never the people. It is the
architecture underneath them. This guide walks through 21 specific changes,
each one with a single action you can assign to someone before the end of the
week.
Every tip follows the same shape: the challenge, what to do about it,
and one immediate action. Here is the full table of contents.
The cost of flying blind
Map every active entity against its funding sources and legal boundaries.
Measure your decision lag, then stop deciding on data older than 48 hours.
Log one month of copy-and-paste hours and price them in salary dollars.
Ask PMs and controllers for the top three steps that delay project reporting.
Inventory every workaround spreadsheet living outside your accounting
system.
Audit your reporting models for hard-coded numbers buried inside live
formulas.
Run the vacation test on draw packages and multi-entity consolidation.
Chart your workflow across all three columns to find where good people
get stuck.
Make a 25% completion financial review mandatory on every active
project.
Predictable and profitable
Lock the original budget so revisions and forecasts live in their own
columns.
Log every executed subcontract and change order within 24 hours of
signature.
Split one cost-to-date number into paid cash, open AP, and retainage
withheld.
Add a current-period view that flags any cost code jumping more than 10%.
Build the cost-at-completion equation once and update it weekly.
Standardize a crosswalk from your cost codes to your lender's draw
categories.
Seeing the whole picture
Standardize the chart of accounts across every project LLC.
Build separate reporting views for leadership, PMs, and controllers.
Alert the team 30 and 60 days before insurance certificates and permits
expire.
Freeze ad-hoc cost codes and mandate one master structure going forward.
Hold a 15-minute weekly sync between accounting and project
management.
Document project onboarding as a checklist so new projects add no
overhead.
Tip 12 is the one most executives act on first, because it takes
an afternoon and it changes what the cost report is actually
telling you.
The Challenge
Collapsing all project costs into one single figure conceals real financial risk.
Insights and Solutions
Immediate action: Break the “cost-to-date” column on your master cost report into three explicit sub-columns: paid cash, open AP, and retainage withheld.
Author, advisor, and nearly 40 years in real estate development finance
Greg has spent nearly four decades building and implementing accounting
systems for development companies, first as an auditor at
PricewaterhouseCoopers, then as a controller, and later as president of
Budgetrac Systems. Today he helps developers move to Acumatica. Along the
way he has seen the same architectural problems repeat across hundreds of
portfolios. The 21 tips in this guide are drawn from his book Looking Through
the Windshield: The Ultimate Guide to Real Estate Development Accounting
Software, the full roadmap for moving a development company from month-
old reporting to live financial control.
If your team spends more time assembling reports than using them to protect
margin, that is the conversation worth having. Greg reviews your current
setup, what you have already tried, and what it is costing you today.
Twenty-four pages, one action per tip, and no cost beyond your
email address. Start looking through the windshield this week.
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