The final account creeps away from the forecast

At some point the job had a forecast final account everyone believed. Since then, every month has added a little: change built but not priced, variations submitted but never agreed, a contra threatened in a meeting and written down nowhere. Each movement was too small to reforecast for, and the sum of them is a destination the paperwork no longer supports.

Maintaining the forecast is a discipline, not a spreadsheet: each month, what the record proves, what is still only expected, and what needs paper behind it before it can be counted, reconciled and said out loud. That is what keeps the closing number a plan rather than a hope, and it is what lets the big decisions late in a job be made against the destination instead of the month.