Job costing

Revenue is what you charged. Cost is what it took. The gap between them is the only number that tells you whether a job — or a whole type of work — is worth doing again.

Professional and up. Requires job-costing.view.

What counts as a cost

Job costing pulls from three places, and it’s only as good as what’s tied to the job:

Labor — from time tracking. Hours clocked against the job, at each person’s cost rate.
Materials and other spend — from expenses, bills and categorized bank transactions that were attached to the job.
Equipment — usage costs for machines assigned to the work.

If a cost was never attached to a job, it isn’t in that job’s number. That’s the whole discipline: attach as you go.

Reading it

Open Books → Job Costing. For each job you get revenue, cost by type, and the margin left over.

What to look for:

A job with negative margin. Either it was underpriced or it went badly. Both are worth knowing before you quote the same work again.
Labor much higher than estimated. The estimate was optimistic, or the crew hit something unexpected. Ask which.
Jobs with no cost at all. Almost always missing attachment, not free work.

Making it accurate

The number is downstream of habits, not settings:

Crews clock in against the job, not just for the day.
Material purchases get the job attached when categorized.
Cost rates on your team are set to something real — wage plus payroll burden, not just the hourly wage.

Tips

Compare like to like. Cleanups and mowing have different margins by nature; the useful comparison is one cleanup against another.
Look at it monthly, not per job. One bad job is noise. A pattern across a service type is a pricing decision.