2026, June 12th – Cost Plus Workflow

June 12th, 2026

Hosted by: Taha, Trainer at Contractor Foreman

Topic: Cost Plus Contracts — Workflow, Billing, and Financial Tracking in Contractor Foreman

Webinar Description

In this advanced training session, Taha Q. walks through one of the most nuanced contract structures in the construction industry — the Cost Plus contract — and shows exactly how to set it up, manage billing, and track financial performance inside Contractor Foreman. Unlike previous sessions focused on fixed-cost projects, this session addresses a workflow where the rules change fundamentally: risk shifts from the contractor to the client, profit is fixed upfront, and financial transparency becomes the foundation of the entire client relationship.

Taha opens by framing the key difference between fixed-cost and cost plus contracting. In a fixed-cost project, the contractor absorbs the risk of cost overruns — if lumber prices spike or unforeseen conditions add expense, that comes out of the contractor’s margin. In a cost plus arrangement, those costs pass through directly to the client, and the contractor’s profit is a predetermined service fee. Taha makes the case that for projects with significant ambiguity, incomplete drawings, or high exposure to unforeseen conditions, cost plus is often the smarter structure — and that COVID-era lumber price swings are a vivid example of why that risk transfer matters.

The session walks through the complete cost plus workflow step by step. It begins with the good faith estimate — not a fixed bid, but a transparent projection of expected costs that the client understands may come in higher or lower — and covers a critical setup detail that trips up many teams: line item markups must be turned off entirely in a cost plus estimate, since the contractor’s only profit is the service fee line item. Taha demonstrates how to structure the estimate correctly and flags exactly where the mistake gets made when importing from the cost item database.

From the estimate, the session moves into invoicing — specifically how T&M billing and progress invoicing work differently under a cost plus structure — and then into the most important tool for managing a cost plus project over time: the Job Cost Actual Report. Taha walks through a live example, showing how to read the report line by line to identify cost overruns that need to be billed to the client as additional change orders, and cost savings that need to be returned to the client as negative change orders. He is direct about one of the most common mistakes in cost plus management: treating leftover budget as profit rather than recognizing it as the client’s money, and how that misunderstanding can create both ethical and contractual problems at project closeout.

Taha joins throughout the session to answer attendee questions and add practical context, including a tip on structuring the service fee line item so that actual profit is cleanly separated from pass-through costs in the estimate — ensuring the client sees the right numbers without exposing internal markup logic.

Attendees were offered a complimentary one-on-one training session to go deeper on cost plus setup, billing workflows, or change order management specific to their projects.

This session is ideal for:

• Contractors who are already operating on cost plus contracts and want to bring their billing and financial tracking fully into Contractor Foreman
• Project managers transitioning from fixed-cost to cost plus work who need to understand how the workflow and reporting differences affect their setup
• Teams who have struggled to communicate cost overruns, savings, or final reconciliation clearly to clients at project closeout
• Anyone who has wondered how to handle cost plus within Contractor Foreman and assumed there must be a dedicated toggle or setting for it

See the full guide: Recommended Workflow to Run a Cost Plus Project