The one page report for the board and the lender
A school board meets once a month and has forty items on the agenda. A lender's construction loan officer has twenty projects. A developer's equity partner gets the report by email and reads it on a phone. For all three, the owner's report is one page, whether or not the owner intended it to be. Everything after the first page is the appendix.
So design the first page as the report. The other pages support it. The test is simple: if a reader sees only this page, can they say where the project stands, what moved, and what they are being asked to decide.
The top third: four numbers and a direction
GMP as amended. Anticipated final cost. The gap, labeled either projected savings or projected exposure. Percent complete. Each figure carries last month's value beside it and an arrow. The arrow is the most read character on the page. A board member who sees the anticipated final cost arrow pointing up will ask why. That is the question the page should provoke.
Do not add a fifth headline number. If the lender wants loan balance against cost to complete, that belongs in the lender's version. The four numbers describe the contract. Everything else describes the financing.
The middle third: contingency and open items
Two funds, side by side. Contractor contingency: original, drawn, remaining, projected exhaustion date. Owner contingency: the same four figures. The date is the sentence. A fund projected to run out before substantial completion is the most actionable item a board can receive, and it belongs here, not in a footnote on page four.
Below the funds, three counts with a dollar figure each: pending change orders by expected value, unclassified change orders older than thirty days, and allowances still open. These are the items that will move next month's anticipated final cost. Showing them now means next month's arrow is not a surprise.
A fictional page
On a fictional $71 million hospital bed tower, the middle third reads: contractor contingency $2.1 million original, $1.6 million drawn, $500,000 remaining, exhaustion projected April against substantial completion in September. Owner contingency $3.5 million original, $800,000 drawn, $2.7 million remaining, no exhaustion projected. Pending change orders $1.2 million. Unclassified over thirty days: two items, $340,000. Open allowances: three, $900,000 carried. A board member reads that in under a minute and knows where the risk is.
The bottom third: flags and decisions
Three to five flags, each one line: what was noticed, which register it comes from, and whether it was closed. Then two to four decisions required before the next report, each with a date and a name. A decision with no name is not a decision. It is a note.
Resist the urge to explain. The flag says contingency burn rate exceeds percent complete by a wide margin. The explanation, with the list of draws and the discussion with the contractor, is in the full report. The one pager points; it does not argue.
Same page, two readers
The board and the lender need the same contract facts and different context. The board wants to know whether the project will close within the approved budget. The lender wants to know whether the remaining loan covers the remaining cost and whether the draw request is supported. The one pager can serve both if the contract position is the core and each reader's context is a single extra line: approved budget and remaining owner funds for the board, loan balance and cost to complete for the lender.
Costwitness generates this page from the monthly snapshot, so the figures match the full report and the arrows compare to what was actually issued last month. Flags on the page are the flags the ledger raised that month. The owner decides which flags to carry to the board and writes the decision lines. The software does not write them.
This month's steps
- Draft a one page version of your current report by hand, using only the four headline figures, two contingency funds, three open item counts, and a decisions list.
- Add a projected exhaustion date to each contingency fund, even if the projection is rough.
- Send the one pager as the first page of the full report and ask one board member whether they read past it.
Questions on this
Should the one pager include schedule information?
Percent complete by schedule belongs beside percent complete by cost, because the comparison between them is what makes burn rate meaningful. Detailed schedule analysis, critical path and float belong in the contractor's report or an appendix.
Is a dashboard on screen a substitute for the one pager?
A dashboard shows the current position. The one pager is a record of what the board was told on a date. Both are useful. The one pager should be printed or exported and kept with the meeting minutes, because it is the version the board acted on.
What if the lender has its own reporting form?
Fill the lender's form from the same snapshot that produced the one pager, so the two never disagree. Lender forms usually ask for cost to complete and sources and uses, which are derived from the anticipated final cost and the certified figures.
In the product
Monthly owner report, Contingency ledger, Anticipated final cost. Free tool: Contingency Runway, Pre-GMP Readiness Score.
Keep reading
Earlier: The three source spreadsheet: why the owner's monthly position is rebuilt by hand. Later: What a monthly owner report should contain, in order. All articles on owner reporting.
See the report your board would read.
Thirty minutes on a call. We generate the twelve page report on a fictional project and hand you the sample PDF.