For decades, preconstruction teams have been flying blind between budget and GMP.

Estimates here, cost models there, submission history living in an email chain three people deep. 

The data exists, but nothing’s been able to help us tell a coherent story of the project.

That’s why we built Cost Trendline. Its release marks the first time estimating and cost tracking have ever lived on the same platform. Here's how it works and why it changes everything for preconstruction teams.

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More of a watcher than a reader? Check out this demo from Director of Product Eric Walker.

One view of the entire cost story

Cost Trendline connects your estimate submissions and your target values into a single view of how cost has moved across the life of a project.

It’s our opinion that this fundamentally changes the way the industry operates…

Preconstruction has spent decades getting better at producing estimates. Faster takeoff, cleaner bids, tighter templates, and it’s worked; the output has gotten better.

But building the estimate is just the tip of the iceberg. The hard part is explaining it — what changed between milestones and why and whether cost is trending about or below budget. Until Cost Trendline, there hasn’t been a tool that tells that story living in the same place as your estimates.

Now, by directly connecting to every iteration, your estimates have become data points that help you build a timestamped project record from start to finish.

Progression bars, plotted data points, and a clean tracker — who doesn’t love a graph?

But it does a lot more than look pretty.

What’s possible with Cost Trendline?

Always know what was sent and when

Estimate submissions in Ediphi are immutable records. Every estimate sent to an owner is preserved with a precise timestamp, eliminating the ambiguity that plagues preconstruction teams: "Was this the version we sent?"

With Cost Trendline, the answer is always visible and auditable.

👉Learn how to submit an estimate here.

Track against your targets

When there’s a budget expectation, the question is always whether your estimates are honoring it and by how much.

Now it’s visible at a glance. Target values are displayed directly behind each submission on the trendline, so the relationship between what was budgeted and what was estimated is never something you have to calculate. You can see immediately whether cost is tracking above or below the planned budget at any point in the project across total cost, cost per square foot, or both.

Compare estimates and targets side-by-side

The trendline tells you that cost moved. The Schedule of Values tells you exactly where.

Click any submission on the trendline and the SOV section loads that estimate's full cost breakdown grouped by Uniformat, MasterFormat, bid package, or any custom sort field.

When an estimate-based target value is set, teal bars show up against each WBS category so you can see not just whether you're over budget, but which systems or scopes are driving it. That's a conversation-changing level of detail in an owner meeting.

Control the story you show

Not every submission needs to be on the trendline. Customization is the beauty of this whole thing…

Project owners can show or hide specific submissions from the graph keeping the cost story clean and focused without permanently losing the underlying data. Nothing gets deleted. Everything stays auditable.

The value of a connected platform

When everyone involved in a project is looking at the same cost story, something shifts.

And the gap between what a project was expected to cost and what it actually costs gets smaller.

Cost Trendline is the clearest expression of that vision yet.

When you can walk into an OAC meeting with a visual that shows exactly how cost has moved, which milestones drove variance, and what's in the estimate underpinning today's GMP, you're miles ahead of the competition.

"We're giving you the ability to now tell this story. We have all of the data. That is the value of a connected platform." — Eric Walker, Director of Product at Ediphi

What’s next?

Cost Trendline is a new infrastructure for an entire future of Ediphi capabilities, including:

• Variance reporting for understanding what changed between submissions and why
• Value engineering integration to help track downstream cost impact over the project lifecycle
• AI-driven cost intelligence that surfaces patterns, anomalies, and predictions from your historical project data

Cost Trendline is available now in Ediphi. If you're an existing customer, reach out to your customer success contact to get a walkthrough. If you're not yet on Ediphi, request a demo to see it in action.