Margin only exists at the company level
You know the year was decent. You cannot say which of the eleven jobs made it decent, so the next bid is still a feeling.
Service
Job Costing
Find out which jobs carried the year and which ones quietly ate the margin.
Job costing means assigning every dollar of cost to the job that caused it. It sounds obvious, and almost nobody does it consistently, because the receipts arrive from six directions and the crew's time is the hardest piece to pin down.
Without it, you have one company-wide margin number that averages your best job with your worst. A 12% blended margin can hide a job at 30% and a job that lost money outright. Job-level costing separates them, which is the difference between guessing at your next bid and pricing from your own history.
The problem
What this usually looks like.
Labor never reaches the job
Payroll posts as one lump. Crew hours are the largest controllable cost on most jobs and the one most often left unallocated.
Burden is ignored
Base wages get counted, payroll taxes and workers' comp do not, so every job looks more profitable than it was.
Sub invoices land in the wrong month
A sub bills six weeks late and wrecks a month that already closed. Costs need to sit with the job and the period they belong to.
What Crew Bookkeeping does
Build the job and cost-code structure
Jobs, phases where useful, and cost codes for labor, materials, subcontractors, equipment, and other, set up so entry is fast rather than theoretical.
Allocate labor with burden
Crew hours mapped to jobs and loaded with payroll taxes and insurance so a job carries its real labor cost.
Code every cost to a job
Supplier bills, card charges, rentals, and sub invoices land on the job that caused them, with a consistent rule for anything genuinely shared.
Report margin per job
Estimated vs. actual by cost code, and gross margin per job, so overruns show up while there is still a job to manage.
Who it's for
- Contractors running more than one job at a time
- Anyone bidding from gut feel rather than historical cost data
- Businesses with meaningful subcontractor or materials spend
- Owners who suspect one type of work is subsidizing another
What you get
- Job and cost code structure inside QuickBooks Online
- Labor allocation with burden applied
- Job profitability report each month
- Estimate vs. actual by cost code on active jobs
- Notes on jobs trending over budget
Related guides
Job costing
Job costing for contractors: what it is and how to set it up
Company-level profit tells you almost nothing about which jobs earned it. Here is the cost code structure and setup sequence that makes job margin visible.
Job costing
Change orders: how to track them so they don't eat your margin
The extra work got done. The paperwork did not. Here is how to log, price, approve, and bill change orders so the work you added shows up in the money you collect.
Find out what your jobs are really earning.
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