Cost value reconciliation (CVR) is the discipline of putting a job's key financial figures side by side — what you priced it at, what you have committed to spend, what it has actually cost, and what you have been paid or certified for — and reading the gaps between them.
The four figures matter individually, but the CVR's real product is the comparison:
- Budget — the cost you won the job on. Everything is measured against this.
- Committed — every purchase order and subcontract order raised, paid or not. This binds you the moment the order goes out.
- Actual — cost that has genuinely landed: invoices, labour, materials drawn.
- Value — what you have applied for, been certified for, or can properly claim.
If committed cost is creeping past budget on a line, the job is going wrong now — whatever the bank balance says. If value is running behind actual cost, you are financing someone else's project.
Why it matters
Margin on contracting work rarely vanishes in one event. It drains — an unpriced variation here, an over-budget order there — and a monthly, backward-looking CVR only reports the leak after the water is gone. Run live, against the same data the job runs on, a CVR becomes an early-warning system instead of a post-mortem.
How it goes wrong
Three classic failures: the budget can't be traced back to the estimate that won the job; committed cost lives in a drawer of POs no one reconciles; and the whole exercise happens two weeks after month-end, when the decisions it should have informed are already made.
In Vyntworks, live CVR reads straight off the quotes, orders, variations and valuations the job already runs on — no re-keying, no month-end scramble. For a deeper look at reading one, see what a CVR actually tells you.