Cost control and MIS: knowing where a project's money and schedule actually stand.

Committed cost is the value the owner is contractually bound to, including orders placed and variations approved, whether or not work has been done. Incurred cost is the value of work actually executed and certified. Tracking only invoices received hides commitments that have already been made, which is how projects appear on budget until they suddenly are not.

Because expenditure to date is history and the forecast is the only number a decision can be taken on. A revised forecast at completion, built from certified work, approved variations, known claims and remaining scope, tells the owner whether the sanctioned budget will hold, while there is still scope to act.

By logging each change when it arises, recording the instruction or the event that caused it, establishing its contractual basis, valuing it against contract rates or agreed rates, and obtaining approval before the work proceeds wherever that is practicable. Uninstructed and unvalued changes accumulate quietly and are settled expensively at final account.

Physical progress against programme, cost position across budget, committed, certified and forecast, the variation and claim registers, cash flow against forecast, quality and safety summary, the current risk position, and an explicit list of decisions the owner needs to take. Anything else is context; those are the contents.

The owner. The consultant compiles, reconciles and reports, and the contractor submits its claims and measurements, but the cost control register is the owner's record of its own commitment. Where the owner's finance system and the project register diverge, reconciling them is part of the job rather than an accounting inconvenience.

Against the contract: what event occurred, whether it is a compensable or excusable delay under the conditions, what its effect on the critical path was, and what relief the contract provides. Assessing entitlement contemporaneously, with the programme evidence available, is far more reliable than reconstructing causation months later.

They are complementary and should share one record. Certification of work done under supervision is the input to the cost position; when they are kept in separate systems, the certified value and the reported cost drift apart and neither is trusted. Running them off a single set of measurements is what keeps the MIS credible.