Generate a construction cost estimate report

Prerequisites

• A working Rust toolchain (see How to install the development toolchain)
• A checkout of the workspace containing the construction crates
• A data directory holding cost_estimate.csv and schedule.csv in the schemas below
• Write permission on that directory — the run creates an output subdirectory inside it

No services need to be running for this task. Other binaries in the same crate do depend on archive-resident services; this one reads two files and writes six.

Purpose

Produce the two kick-off documents for a construction project — a costing report and a schedule with a Gantt timeline — as HTML and PDF, alongside two machine-checkable logs that state whether the source data is internally consistent.

This is a batch task on the command line, and the command line is the whole interface. tool-construction has no terminal screen, no F-key slot, and no graphical surface of any kind. There is nothing to click and no view to open; a guide describing one would be describing something that does not exist.

For the ledger design these reports sit on top of, see tool-construction — construction cost, schedule, and quality ledger.

Procedure

1. Point the tool at your data directory

export TCO26_DATA_DIR=/data/construction/example-project

Set this. If the variable is unset the binary falls back to a hard-coded absolute path belonging to the deployment it was first built for — a path that will not exist on your machine, so the run fails on the first file read with an error naming a directory you have never heard of. That fallback is a convenience for one machine, not a default worth relying on.

2. Confirm the two input files

The tool reads exactly two files from that directory, both plain CSV with a header row.

cost_estimate.csv:

category,component,quantity,unit,unit_cost,price,rate_per_sf,rate_per_sm,pct_of_total,tier,excluded_flag,source_doc,source_page

schedule.csv:

task_id,task_name,parent_id,indent_level,task_type,duration_days,start_date,finish_date,phase,source_doc,source_page

Two fields behave less simply than their names suggest, and both are worth checking before a first run:

• quantity in the cost estimate is genuinely four different things depending on the row: a measured amount with a unit, a rate applied to a basis, the literal string Excluded, or empty. The loader models all four. It is not a number column with some blanks.
• start_date and finish_date accept ISO 2026-06-13, US 6/13/2026 or 6/13/26, a weekday-prefixed form such as Mon 6/13/26 (what a scheduling tool's default export commonly emits), and Jun 13, 2026. Anything else parses as absent. The parser returns nothing rather than guessing — see the verification step below for why that matters more than it sounds.

3. Run the report binary

From the workspace root:

cargo run -p tool-construction-tco-26

That is the complete command. There are no flags, no subcommands, and no positional arguments — the binary does not parse a command line at all, so there is no --help to consult, no --output to redirect with, and no way to run only the costing stage or only the schedule stage. One invocation always runs both, cost estimate first, then schedule. Every knob the tool has is an environment variable.

4. Read the console summary

A successful run prints structural counts and file paths, and nothing else:

[cost estimate] 0 variance(s) — see /data/construction/example-project/outputs/2026/cost_estimate_reconciliation.log
Wrote /data/construction/example-project/outputs/2026/cost_estimate.html
Wrote /data/construction/example-project/outputs/2026/cost_estimate.pdf
[cost estimate] categories: 7, allowances: 4
[schedule] 0 defect(s) — see /data/construction/example-project/outputs/2026/schedule_validation.log
Wrote /data/construction/example-project/outputs/2026/schedule.html
Wrote /data/construction/example-project/outputs/2026/schedule.pdf
[schedule] tasks: 118, phases: 8

The absence of money and dates is deliberate, not an oversight. An early build printed reconciliation totals to the terminal; the behavior was changed so that stdout carries only counts, and anything substantive lands in a file. Do not add a print statement to "just check a number quickly" — write it to the output directory instead.

5. Generate the correspondence register

A fourth kick-off report — a correspondence and transmittal register — is also produced from this same data directory, as its own independent, no-services-needed binary:

cargo run --bin correspondence -p tool-construction-tco-26

This reads correspondence.csv from the same TCO26_DATA_DIR and writes correspondence.html/.pdf into the same output directory. Every entry is cited by the content hash of the real transmittal it refers to, never by copying the message body or any personal contact information into the report — the underlying document stays in the platform's own archive storage, and this report only proves which document is which.

A fifth kick-off report, the materials/work-package listing, exists but is not a simple standalone command the way the reports above are — it's produced as part of the calibrate binary, which depends on the archive-resident service-materials daemon being reachable. That's a materially different, more involved task (see Monitor an active construction project and "What this task does not do" below), covered separately rather than folded into this guide.

Expected outcome

Six files in <data-dir>/outputs/<year>/ from step 3, plus two more from step 5, which the run creates if absent:

Verification

Three checks, in this order. The third is not optional.

Read the reconciliation log. The tool re-adds each category's non-excluded line prices and compares the result to that category's own printed total, then does the same for the base total, the allowances total, and the grand total against base plus allowances. The tolerance is two cents. An empty variance list means the source document is internally consistent. A non-empty list is a real finding about the input data, not a bug in the tool — each entry names the scope, the computed figure, the printed figure, and the difference.

Read the validation log. The schedule check reports a task whose declared parent does not exist, a task whose indent level disagrees with its parent's depth, and a task that finishes before it starts, plus any defect the loader recorded while parsing.

Open the PDF and look at it. Both real defects this reporting path has produced were invisible to the logs and obvious on the page. A too-narrow column silently truncated identifiers to an ellipsis while every count and check reported success. Separately, a date format the parser did not yet accept produced empty Start and Finish columns and a blank timeline — and because the inverted-span check only runs when both dates parse, that failure reported as zero defects. A clean log next to an empty date column is the signature of that failure, not evidence of a clean schedule.

What this task does not do

• It does not estimate. The costing report renders and cross-checks the figures the CSV already states. It does not build a bottom-up estimate from work packages, quantities, and labour rates. That pipeline exists — it is the calibrate, solve_rate, and post_ledger binaries in the same crate — but it depends on archive-resident materials, schedule, and notification services being reachable, and it is a different task from this one.
• It does not report earned value. Independently observed installed quantity is the input every earned-value and cost-performance figure depends on, and no source for it exists in this data model today. Reports that would consume it are planned; none is produced by this command.
• It is not yet multi-project. The reporting crate is per-deployment, and its name carries a deployment-specific suffix. A second deployment currently means a second bin crate rather than a project argument — which is the honest reason step 3 has no --project flag to document.
• It writes no ledger entries. This command reads two files and renders documents. Posting to the ledger is post_ledger's job.
• It does not generate the materials/work-package listing. That fifth kick-off report depends on the archive-resident service-materials daemon and is produced by calibrate, not by any binary this guide covers.

Edge cases

• A missing or unreadable cost_estimate.csv prints Failed to load <path>: <error> to stderr and exits with status 1. Nothing is written.
• A missing schedule.csv fails the same way — but only after the costing report has already been written. Half an output set is the expected result of that failure, not corruption. Fix the input and re-run; the files are overwritten.
• A row with fewer fields than the header is not skipped with a warning. Both loaders index fixed column positions, so a short row aborts the run. Repair the CSV rather than working around it.
• Output files are overwritten in place. There is no versioning, no timestamped directory, and no prompt. Copy anything you need to keep before re-running.
• A date the parser cannot read is left empty rather than coerced. This is correct behavior and it is also how an entire empty timeline can render without a single error — hence the visual check above.

Rollback

Nothing to undo in the source data: the run reads cost_estimate.csv and schedule.csv and never writes to them. Its only writes are the six files under outputs/<year>/. Delete them, or re-run to replace them.

Next steps

• Export structured data from the platform — moving the rendered output or its source records somewhere else
• How to install the development toolchain — if cargo run is not yet available on your machine

See also

• tool-construction — construction cost, schedule, and quality ledger — the ledger design, cost-code model, and earned-value approach these reports render
• tool-accounting — double-entry ledger and audit-ready financial statements — the sibling accounting engine designed to receive cost from this ledger
• The financial and construction tool family — a shared design across three products — where this tool sits among the financial and construction tools
• Monitor an active construction project — the recurring-cadence reports that follow this kick-off set
• Generate a construction draw workbook — the sibling accounting-side reports covering this project's statutory and payment-timing exposure