=Checking by Charts.= A great advantage of the chart system of cost showing, is that it acts as an automatic check upon the cost─keeping system in general. As indicated earlier in this volume, it occasionally happens that a punch─card is not turned in, or the time─keeper fails to get certain data. This is immediately discoverable by the gap on the chart, and thus the chart acts as a check on the cost─getting department. This will not entirely obviate the necessity for inspection to ascertain whether the time─cards are properly kept and the work is properly done. The showing of costs should be made _daily_ for the men immediately identified with the field work; they should be made _weekly_ for the general manager, and _monthly_ for the home office. These monthly office reports are sometimes valuable in the planning of the financial arrangements for the work. On a job involving, say, a pay─roll of $5,000 a week, with monthly estimates, early information as to performance over the month is of very great value. Showing the men certain charts and records will serve to increase their interest in their work, but this should not be overdone. It is as well that the men should not know the actual cost of their work to the contractor in dollars and cents. If, on the contract price, the contractor is making a handsome profit, the men want more money. If the contractor is not making a handsome profit, the men are apt to think that they are on a losing job, and become discouraged accordingly. The economy of the contractor's work should be private information, since it might do him considerable damage by becoming known to competing contractors. The charts showing the performance per unit of time, however, are not subject to the restrictions above mentioned. COST KEEPING In the foregoing there has been nothing that is a part of the regular bookkeeping, with the exception that part of the time─keeper's records are necessary to the bookkeeper. It should be appreciated at the start, that the bookkeeper's work is of great importance, that it cannot be superseded by a cost─keeping system, and that it should not be divided up with the cost─keeping system. The scoffers at cost analysis are inclined to take the ground that a bookkeeper, a cost─keeper, a cost─analysis engineer, are more or less clumsy substitutes for managerial intelligence; and they point to the proposition that in the last analysis it should be easy to let the office boy run the job with a textbook at one elbow and a calculating machine at the other. It is insisted upon at the start, that cost keeping is as important as bookkeeping, but that it has an entirely different function; and in applying cost keeping to construction work, it is very important that a distinct line of demarcation be drawn between the two branches.