What actually tells you whether a construction company is healthy?

For Josh Bohlke, CFO of Columbia River Electric Maintenance, the answer goes far beyond the P&L.

After moving from commercial banking into the CFO seat at a $30–40 million electrical contractor, Josh saw firsthand how different construction finance looks from inside the business. In this episode of Finance at the Jobsite, we dig into WIP, backlog, gross profit, job costing, working capital, ERP data quality, automation, and the changing role of the construction CFO.

Josh explains why WIP is more art than science, why contractors need to understand their balance sheet, and how bad ERP data—from stale POs to unclosed jobs—can quietly distort decision-making.

We also discuss:

• Why backlog and gross profit are two of the most important construction KPIs
• How labor hours, installed quantities, and cost should be used together to evaluate job performance
• Why analyzing the business entirely through the P&L can be dangerous
• When it may be worth reconverting or cleaning up your construction ERP
• Lessons from rebuilding a Spectrum ERP environment
• Why clean data can help identify job fade weeks instead of months later
• Where automation works well in construction—and where human judgment is still critical
• The opportunity to automate AP, credit-card coding, and vendor statement reconciliation
• Procore, Spectrum, integrations, and the reality of “software fatigue”
• Why building your own software with AI may work for small workflows but create security and maintenance risks for mission-critical systems
• How AI could shift finance teams away from building spreadsheets and dashboards toward interpreting data and making strategic decisions
• Why the CFO's job requires not only financial expertise, but tact when delivering difficult messages to ownership

A practical conversation about what it really takes to run the finance function inside a growing construction company—and how that job may change as AI becomes part of the back office.

#ConstructionFinance #ConstructionCFO #ConstructionAccounting #JobCosting #WIP #ConstructionTechnology #ConstructionERP #APAutomation #ArtificialIntelligence #ConstructionAI #Procore #ViewpointSpectrum #CashFlow #WorkingCapital #FinanceLeadership #ElectricalContractor #FinanceAtTheJobsite