Reports

Last reviewed May 2026 · Reports

Lotwright's report library gives you the performance numbers you actually need as a production homebuilder — cycle time, gross margin, and schedule variance — without building custom Excel sheets every month.

Report library

The report library includes 27 pre-built reports. Each report is tailored to a specific operational question — "How long are my jobs taking?" "Am I hitting my margin target?" "Which trades are always late?"

Reports update automatically as you add jobs, close jobs, and approve invoices — no manual data entry or export needed.

Enable reports for your sidebar

Go to Settings → Reports to choose which reports appear in your sidebar. You can enable up to 12. The sidebar shows a truncated title for each enabled report. Reports are available to Owner and Admin roles by default; Supers can be granted access in Settings.

Cycle Time report

Shows how long your jobs take from permit pull to closing, broken down by community, plan, and superintendent. Compare against your own 13-month rolling average and identify which communities or plans are taking longer.

A job's cycle time is measured from Permit Pulled status to Closed status. Jobs still in progress show their elapsed time so far.

Schedule Variance report

Shows how actual task completion dates compare to the template dates. A task completed 5 days later than scheduled shows as +5 days variance. Positive variance (behind schedule) highlights in amber; severe variance in red.

Use this to identify which phases — and which trades — are consistently behind. A framing crew that runs 8 days behind on every job is a staffing or coordination problem worth fixing.

Closed-Job Margin report

Shows gross margin % for every closed job over the rolling 13 months. Breakdown by community, plan, and superintendent. Bar chart compares each job's margin against the Shinn 12% benchmark.

Summary stats include: average GM%, number of closings, jobs above/at/below target, and total margin dollars.

The 12% Shinn benchmark

The 12% gross margin benchmark comes from Shinn Consulting, the leading management consulting firm for production homebuilders. It represents the minimum healthy gross margin for a builder doing 10–100 homes per year — enough to cover overhead, reinvestment, and reasonable owner compensation.

Jobs below 12% aren't necessarily failures — sometimes a particular deal required it — but a pattern of sub-12% margins is a leading indicator of business health problems. Lotwright shows the benchmark so you can see the pattern, not just the individual jobs.