Cost Control
You can track what markups actually cost, not only what they were budgeted at.
Markups — insurance, contingency, financing costs, overheads — are budgeted as a percentage of the production. In cost control they are tracked like anything else, because they are also paid like anything else.
Open them with **Markups** in the toolbar.
A markup row takes cost items in the same way an account does: an insurance premium invoiced and paid, a finance fee charged.
That matters most for **contingency**, which is the markup a production actually spends. Booking against it is how you see what is left of it — which is the number a producer wants far more often than the percentage it was struck at.
A markup's budget figure is a calculation — a percentage of a base. Its Paid figure is whatever was really invoiced, and the two routinely differ:
- insurance quoted on a schedule that changed; - a financing fee negotiated down; - contingency, which is budgeted as a lump and spent as incidents.
Cost control is where that difference becomes visible instead of being absorbed.
Markups are part of the set's totals, so the rail's Budget, Forecast and Paid include them. A set that tracked only accounts and ignored markups would understate the production.
In **budgeting**, like everything structural — the percentages, the bases and which accounts they apply to are the budget's business, and the budget is locked while the set exists. Cost control tracks what they cost; it does not restructure them — see [how a cost control set relates to a budget](/kb/article/how-a-cost-control-set-relates-to-a-budget).
Markdown