The “What Can We Learn From This Chart” Workbooks

In this case the company is a general all around carpentry contractor but in the spring summer and fall they have an excellent deck business that really picks up for them and when the winter season takes over the outdoor work which is their bread and butter scales down and they go inside. The costs lines that are variable Materials (red) and Subcontracting (magenta) do trend down and in fact continue down through the tough winter months of January and February and that is because hey get more service and maintenance type projects in the winter months which have a higher ratio of Labor to Materials. And while it isn’t anything you could necessarily pick up from looking at the graph I also happen to know to first hand that two of the jobs they did late January and February of last year were labor only interior finish subcontracts to a Kitchen & Bath studio where the K&B studio supplied all the materials.

I’ve made a third and perhaps final round of revisions to both the Number 09 (for users of Apple iWork 09 suite) and the Excel (for MS Excel Mac & Windows users) workbooks and included a PDF of the Number document so any interested parties can at least see what the document looks like in comparison to the MS Excel version. (Thursday, February 12, 2009 ; 5:25 PM)