The Job Closed in the System and Two Men Kept Going Back
· 7 min read · Written by Faceela Research & Editorial Team
Reviewed by Ahmed Hassan Algammal — Founder and Enterprise Systems Consultant
Two men and a van leave the workshop most mornings. They go to sites you finished — last month, three months ago, in one case last year. They adjust a door, change a handle, refix a panel that dropped, fill a joint that opened when the air conditioning was commissioned.
Ask which job they were on and you will get a site name. Ask what that morning cost and you will get a shrug, then a reasonable estimate, then the observation that it is only two men and a van.
Now multiply it by every working day in a year. It stops being two men and a van somewhere around the second month, and it has never once appeared against a job.
One switch where there should have been two
Here is the mechanism, and it is a system design decision rather than a habit.
In almost every workshop, a job is closed when the last invoice is raised. That single event does two entirely different things: it stops the job being billable, and it stops the job being costable. The first is correct — there is nothing left to bill. The second is a mistake, because the costs have not finished arriving.
What is needed is two states rather than one: closed for billing and closed for cost, with a gap between them wide enough to hold the defect liability period. Most workshops have never been offered that gap. Their system has one switch, the switch is thrown when the invoice goes out, and every cost after that has to land somewhere else because the only place it belongs is shut.
The shape of it
The record stops here. The cost does not.
The job the system draws
- Order
- Drawing approved
- Material bought
- Cut
- Assembled
- Finished
- Delivered
- Installed
- Final invoice
What arrives after the line
When · The weeks after handover
1. Snagging visits
Two men and a van, going back for a door that drops, a handle that was wrong, a joint that opened when the air conditioning came on.
Where it lands instead: Workshop wages and vehicle running costs, for the month the visit happened in. No job, no project, no trace.
When · The same weeks, in the workshop
2. Rework on returned units
A damaged panel comes back, is stripped, repaired, resprayed and sent out again. It occupies the spray booth a second time.
Where it lands instead: General production hours and general spray consumption, indistinguishable from the new job running beside it.
When · Whenever the fitter needs it
3. Replacement material and hardware
A hinge, a length of edging, a sheet of matching laminate, a handle in the right finish. Issued from the store because the van is leaving in ten minutes.
Where it lands instead: Stock consumption with no job number, or the last job the storeman had open, which is somebody else's.
When · Months later, sometimes a year
4. Defect liability call-outs
The period was written into the contract, nobody diarised it, and the client calls because the contract says he may.
Where it lands instead: Nowhere. It is treated as goodwill, because by then there is no job left to charge it to and no line that would accept it.
Closed for billing is not closed for cost
Those are two different decisions, and most workshops have only ever been offered one switch. A job that stays open for cost while closed for billing is the whole repair — and the reason it is rarely made is that nobody was asked.
A snag and a variation look identical at the moment they are recorded
This is the second half of the loss, and it is the more recoverable half.
Someone walks the finished job with the client or the main contractor and a list is produced. On that list, in the same handwriting, in the same column, are things that are your fault and things that are a change of mind. Nothing about the format distinguishes them, and by the time anyone thinks to, the work has been done and the moment to say that is a variation has gone.
| What the snag list says | What it actually is | Who pays, if it is separated on the day |
|---|---|---|
| Door not closing flush | Defect — your adjustment | You |
| Handle is the wrong model | Depends entirely on which model was approved | Whoever changed it after approval |
| Scratch on the end panel | Defect, unless the room was handed over and others worked in it | You, or the party with custody |
| Add a shelf to the tall unit | Variation. It is not on any drawing | The client |
| Colour does not match the sample | Defect if it differs from the approved sample; variation if the sample changed | Decided by the approved drawing revision |
| Cut-out moved for the new socket position | Variation caused by another trade | The party that moved the socket |
| Refix after the marble was replaced | Variation. Your work was correct and was removed | The party that replaced the marble |
Every row on the right-hand column is decidable, and every one is decidable on the day the item is recorded and almost never afterwards. The evidence for it — the approved drawing revision, the handover record, the readiness photographs — exists at that moment and gets harder to assemble every week that passes.
So the practical control is not a better argument later. It is a field: every snag gets classified as defect or variation when it is written down, by the person writing it down, with the drawing revision attached. The ones classified as variations then follow the same route as any other approved change and end up on an invoice.
The liability period nobody put in a diary
Most fit-out contracts carry a defect liability period. It has a length, it has a start date, and it ends.
Ask a workshop when the period ends on the job they handed over eight months ago and the answer is usually a search through a contract folder. Which means two failures at once: attendance is given after the obligation has expired, because nobody knew it had; and the retention or final payment tied to the end of that period is not chased, because nobody knew it was due.
Both are the same missing thing — a date, on a record, that raises something when it passes. Neither is difficult. Both are invisible in a business whose only concept of a finished job is a closed one.
The same defect, on job after job, with nothing that adds it up
The most expensive consequence of unrecorded snagging is not the cost of the snags. It is that nothing accumulates.
A hinge from one supplier drops on tall doors after a few months. A particular lacquer blooms in high humidity. A wall-fixing method fails on a certain kind of blockwork. A supplier's soft-close runners come back on three jobs out of four.
Every one of those is discoverable from a hundred snag records with a cause field on them, and none of them is discoverable from a hundred mornings that two men remember individually. The workshop that repairs and never records is doomed to repair the same thing forever, not because anybody is slow but because the pattern is only visible in aggregate and the aggregate was never created.
That is the difference between snagging as a cost and snagging as information. The cost is annoying. The information is worth more than the cost, and both are being thrown away by the same closed job.
What to make a vendor show you
On a live system, on a job that has already been handed over, not on slides.
- Close a job for billing and keep it open for cost, and show both states on the same record.
- Record a snag from a phone on site, with a photograph, against the job it belongs to.
- Classify that snag as a defect or a variation at the moment it is recorded, with the approved drawing revision attached.
- Send the variation ones down the normal approval and billing route without anyone retyping them.
- Book a site visit — two men, a van, three hours — against the job, and show it on that job's cost sheet.
- Issue replacement hardware from the store against the job rather than against general consumption.
- Show the defect liability period per job, what is still inside it, and what falls due when it ends.
- Report recurring snag causes across all jobs, by cause, by supplier and by product type.
Item 1 is the one that decides it. Everything else on this list depends on there being a job open to receive it, and the single reason all of this cost is homeless today is that the record was closed by the invoice. A vendor who cannot separate those two states will demonstrate items 2 to 8 against a job that will be shut by the time any of them actually happen.
Item 8 is the one that changes what you build. The rest recovers money already spent; that one stops it being spent again.
The short version
Snagging is a real production activity with real labour, real material and a real vehicle, performed by a workshop that closed the job when it sent the last invoice.
So the cost lands in workshop wages, in general spray consumption, in stock issued with no job number, and eventually in goodwill — four places where it is true, accounted for, and completely unattributable. The margin the system reports on a job is therefore the margin as at the day of the last invoice, which is the one day of the job's life when the cost is guaranteed to be understated.
The repair is not more forms for the fitters. It is a job that stays open for cost after it closes for billing, a classification field at the moment the snag is written down, and a diary entry on the day the liability period ends.
The full cost anatomy this sits inside is three costs that never reach the job, the delivery decision that creates much of it is delivering into a room that is not ready, and the reason the reported margin looks fine throughout is why your ERP dashboard is lying to you. What it looks like built as one system is on the joinery, steel and fabrication page, and the system is Flow.