Why does job costing never get done?

Not because contractors can't do arithmetic. Because the arithmetic happens six weeks after the job, when the receipts are in four places and nobody remembers whether Tuesday was the Alvarez bathroom or the Halvorsen sewer line.

So the invoice becomes the scorecard. It's the only number that exists in one piece. You billed $12,500, the material bill was around four grand, it felt like a good job, and it goes in the win column. Nobody ever adds up the 112 hours it actually took against the 80 you bid, or the $1,800 tile sub, or the $320 permit, or the $362 the card company took off the top. Add those and the job lost $517.

Someone who tracks about 2,200 service businesses put the mechanism in one sentence on r/smallbusiness: "labor estimating runs 12% over on average. if hours aren't tied daily to the job, your job costing is fake." That is the whole problem. Not the report. The daily tie.

The shops that get this right are not the ones with the fanciest software. Ask in any contractor thread how people do it and you get answers like "Envelope in truck gang" and "Each job gets a folder in my phone and in my truck." The best comment in that whole genre: paper versus app matters less than forcing every cost through one rule — no job code, no reimbursement, no entry. Once that rule is real, any container works. Until it's real, a $199-a-month platform gives you the same fiction with nicer charts.

And the reporting people pay for often isn't there anyway. Service Fusion customers report that "you can't run job reports, for example, to determine how long it takes to complete a job" and, flatly, "Service Fusion's reporting is useless, as it's impossible to run a valid report." That's a platform whose last published prices ran $208 to $533 a month before it stopped publishing them in July 2026.

What does job costing software cost in 2026?

Per-job profit reporting is one of the most reliably gated features in the category. It's almost never in the entry tier, because it's the thing that makes people upgrade.

Prices as of August 2026 from vendor pricing pages and published increases: Intuit's 1 August 2026 QuickBooks Online increase (Plus $99 to $140, Advanced $200 to $340, no grandfathering); Jobber published pricing after its July 2026 increase; Buildertrend and Procore figures as quoted by a general contractor at roughly $4M revenue on r/Construction; Service Fusion last-known pricing before it stopped publishing in July 2026. This category raises prices most summers, so check before you commit.

Two honest things about that table. First, those products are not overpriced for what they are — QuickBooks Plus at $140 gives you actual bookkeeping, and a browser page can never touch bank feeds. Second, a lot of shops buy the $199 tier for job costing and then never enter the costs, which is the most expensive way to not job cost. If that's you, the problem was never the software.

The same GC who published his quotes had the fairest summary of the whole category: "It's wild how the industry hides pricing just to sell a bloated $1,000/month database that forces you to change how your whole business operates. For a lean team doing $4M, those massive setups are totally out of touch with reality."

Where is this free version enough?

It's enough if you're one to five people, you finish somewhere between five and forty jobs a month, and you already invoice with something — a book, a template, Square, whatever. This is the autopsy, and the autopsy is the part almost everybody skips. Doing it on twenty jobs a year in a browser beats doing it on zero jobs a year in a platform.

It's enough to answer the questions that actually change decisions:

• Which job types pay, and which ones you keep taking out of habit.
• Which customers are worth the drive and which ones you should price 20% higher next time or lose gracefully.
• Which lead source produces profitable work, not just work.
• Whether your bidding is drifting, and by how much in dollars.
• What your true average margin is, against the one in your head.

It's not enough for five things, and pretending otherwise would waste your afternoon.

• It doesn't collect costs for you. No bank feed, no receipt scan, no card sync. You type the numbers. If you won't do that, buy QuickBooks Plus and connect the bank.
• It doesn't sync. One browser, one device. Export the JSON if you want it somewhere else.
• It doesn't do work in progress. This is for finished jobs. Percent-complete accounting on a six-month build needs Buildertrend or a real accountant.
• It doesn't allocate overhead. Gross profit here is before your truck payment, insurance, office and your own pay. A 35% gross margin is not 35% in your pocket.
• It isn't your books. Nothing here goes on a tax return. It tells you how to bid; your accountant tells you what you owe.

How do you use it?

1. Set the burdened rate first. Wage plus payroll taxes, workers comp, liability, vehicle, phone, and paid time off, divided by the hours you can actually sell. For most residential trades that lands somewhere between $45 and $80 an hour for a mid-level tech in 2026, and it is always higher than people guess. The employee cost calculator does it properly.
2. Add a job the week it finishes, while the hours are still recoverable. Put the contract price in, plus the hours and material dollars you had in the bid. Those two estimate boxes are the whole variance section.
3. Enter labor by person. A lead tech and a helper cost very different amounts and the blend matters. Include drive time and the return trip, because the job ate them.
4. Sweep everything else in. Dump fees, the permit, the rental, the fuel, the callback, the card fee. The small lines are where jobs quietly lose their margin: $185 of permit and $139 of card fees is $324 off a $4,800 job, which is nearly seven points.
5. Read the verdict, then the dollars per labor hour. The verdict says whether the price was right. The hourly says whether the job was worth the day.
6. Do five jobs before you conclude anything, then read Step 3 and export the CSV. The rollup is where the money is; a single job just tells you about that job.

What actually belongs in a job cost?

Everything that would not have been spent if the job had never happened. That test settles almost every argument, including the ones people have with themselves.

The line between job cost and overhead trips people up, so here's the short version. Job cost is what the job consumed. Overhead is what the business consumes whether the phone rings or not. Gross profit is revenue minus job cost. Net profit is gross profit minus overhead. This page stops at gross profit on purpose — it's the number that tells you whether you priced the work right, and it's the only one you can compute without your whole tax return open.

Markup or margin — which one are you using?

This costs more money than any other mistake in the trades, and it costs it silently, on every job, for years.

Markup is measured off your cost. Margin is measured off the price. Add 30% to a $1,000 cost and you get $1,300, but your margin is $300 ÷ $1,300 = 23%, not 30%. A contractor on r/Contractor in June 2026 laid it out: "I kept underpricing jobs for 2 years until I learned the difference between markup and margin… I was quoting jobs at '30% profit' and wondering why I was barely breaking even. Turns out I was confusing markup with margin. A 30% markup is only a 23% margin. On a $10k job that's $700 you're leaving on the table. Every. Single. Job."

The formula both ways: margin = markup ÷ (1 + markup), and markup = margin ÷ (1 − margin). To hit a 35% margin you need to multiply cost by 1.538, which most people would call a 54% markup and refuse to say out loud. It is the same price either way. Only one of the two words tells you what you kept.

The same thread showed there's no shared vocabulary at all — "I've seen 50-100% mark up on material" next to "I run a 50% markup on labor and material. Labor is a cost. Not profit." Those two people may be pricing identically or 30 points apart and neither can tell from the conversation. Which is why job costing beats asking around: it answers in margin, after the fact, with your own numbers.

Why is gross profit per labor hour the number to watch?

Because crew hours are what you're actually short of. Money follows hours, not percentages.

Run the sample data on this page and the ranking flips depending on which number you read. The $385 drain call produces $231.34 of gross profit on 1.75 hours, so $132.19 an hour. The $12,500 remodel produces −$517.50 on 112 hours. The $1,850 water heater produces $773 on 4.5 hours, which is $171.78 an hour and the best number on the board — off the second-smallest ticket.

That's the pattern almost every service shop finds when it costs a quarter honestly. The big jobs feel like the business and the small ones feel like a nuisance, and the small ones are carrying the payroll. Not always. But you can't know which way it goes for you until the hours are on the sheet next to the dollars, and no invoice will ever tell you.

One caution so this isn't read too simply: gross profit per hour rewards jobs where you barely showed up, so a shop that chases only the highest hourly number ends up with a calendar full of forty-minute calls and no backlog. Read it next to margin and next to total profit dollars. A job that pays $17 an hour is a problem; a job that pays $132 an hour twice a week does not fill a truck.

What good margins look like, and what the spread tells you

There's no single right number, because the right number is whatever covers your overhead plus the profit you actually want. As a working range in residential trades, service and repair work usually needs to hold 35% to 50% gross margin, and larger installs and remodels run 25% to 35% because the material content is higher and it's a bigger single bite.

The more useful thing is the spread. If your jobs run 45, 42, 40, 38 and 5, the problem is not your pricing — it's one job type, or one customer, or one estimator. Fixing that single job is worth more than a 5% price rise across everything, and it doesn't cost you any customers.

Here's the arithmetic on why the spread matters, worked longhand on the sample data. Five jobs, $25,935 of revenue, $22,733.37 of job cost, $3,201.64 of gross profit. That is a 12.3% true average margin. Take the one job that lost $517.50 out and the remaining four jobs made $3,719.14 on $13,435 of revenue — a 27.7% margin. One job out of five moved the shop's whole quarter by more than 15 points. The four good jobs never needed a price rise. The bad one needed a different bid, or a decline.

How far does estimating actually drift?

The benchmark to hold yourself against is about 12% over on labor, which is what someone tracking around 2,200 service businesses reported as the average. Under 10% is good. Over 25% and the estimate isn't an estimate, it's a hope.

Convert it to dollars and it stops being abstract. On the sample data, the labor overrun across five jobs came to $2,798.10 and the materials overrun came to $1,282, so estimating missed by $4,080.10 total. The same five jobs made $3,201.64. The gap between what those jobs were bid at and what they cost was larger than the entire profit on them.

Three drifts do most of the damage, and they're each worth checking in your own numbers:

• Setup, breakdown and the parts run. Nobody bids the second trip to the supply house. On a two-day job it's an hour and a half you didn't sell.
• The last 10% of the job. Punch list, trim, the fixture that came in wrong, the walkthrough. It's routinely a quarter of the hours and it's almost never in the bid.
• The owner's hours. If you don't cost your own time, every job you personally rescue looks profitable, and you learn exactly the wrong lesson about which jobs to take.

Once you have four or five jobs on this page, you get a personal correction factor. If your labor consistently runs 18% over, then bidding 18% more hours isn't padding, it's arithmetic. That single adjustment is worth more than any software you can buy, and you can only get it from your own finished jobs.

A worked example, longhand

The $4,800 repipe from the sample data, all the way through:

• Labor: lead tech 18 hours × $62 = $1,116. Helper 12 hours × $41 = $492. Labor $1,608 over 30 hours, a blended $53.60 an hour.
• Other costs: materials $1,180, permits $185, fuel $46. Card fee 2.9% of $4,800 = $139.20.
• Total cost: $1,608 + $1,180 + $185 + $46 + $139.20 = $3,158.20.
• Gross profit: $4,800 − $3,158.20 = $1,641.80. Margin: $1,641.80 ÷ $4,800 = 34.2%.
• Gross profit per labor hour: $1,641.80 ÷ 30 = $54.73.
• Estimate was 24 hours and $900 of material. Actual 30 hours and $1,180. Six hours over at the blended $53.60 is $321.60; materials $280 over. The bid missed by $601.60, which is 37% of everything the job made.

The job was fine. It cleared its target and it paid $54.73 an hour of gross profit. But the same job bid correctly would have made $2,243.40, and the shop that bids five of these a month is leaving about $3,000 a month on the table without ever having a bad job.

Common questions