How RC Ingeniería caught a project
losing money before it was too late

12 years managing projects in Excel. Nobody knew how much each one was making.

RC Ingeniería has 12 years of history. Rodrigo had scaled the company from 2 to 4 simultaneous active projects, with a team of 15 people. But they were still managing finances the same way as day one: one Excel spreadsheet per project, one bank account for everything, and an administrator who spent the first days of every month cross-referencing bank statements with payments.

"The problem wasn't that we didn't have the data — the problem was that the data always arrived late. By the tenth of the month you knew how you closed the previous month. By then you'd already made decisions based on old information."

With four active projects, it was nearly impossible to know at a glance which one was on track and which was starting to go off the rails. Everything was mixed into the same bank account.

"We had the classic problem of not knowing what each project cost until it was done. By the time you finished and ran the numbers, it was too late to change anything."

In the first month, Costrol revealed something nobody had seen.

Rodrigo uploaded the previous month's bank statement for one of his projects, assigned the transactions to the corresponding jobs, and in less than 30 minutes had a breakdown by category. That's when he saw the problem.

A project in Ñuñoa showed a deviation of $8.4 million against budget. Nobody on the team had caught it because the expenses were spread across different dates and mixed with those from other projects. Only when grouped together — by project and category — did the problem become visible.

"When I saw the number I froze. That project was still active — there were 6 weeks of work left. We had time to renegotiate the finishing subcontract and recover part of the margin. Without Costrol, we would have found out at closing."

With Costrol I see the margin in real time. I discovered a project was losing money before it was too late. For a construction company owner, that's worth more than the plan costs in the first day of the month.