Job costing for tradies: a plain-English guide

"Job costing" sounds like accountant talk, but it's dead simple: it's knowing what a job costs you versus what you charge for it, so you know whether it made money. Do it well and you stop guessing which jobs are worth taking.

What job costing actually is

For every job you take the money coming in (the invoice or quote total) and subtract everything that job cost you to do - materials, labour, hire, disposal, the lot. What's left is your profit on that job. Track it across all your jobs and patterns jump out: this type of work is gold, that one's a trap, this client always blows the timeline.

Why it's worth the bother

• You quote better, because you know what similar jobs really cost last time
• You drop the work that never makes money and chase more of the work that does
• You spot a job going bad while you can still fix it
• You can prove your numbers when it's time to put prices up

The simplest method that works

1. Give the job a value: the quote or invoice total
2. Log materials against it as you buy them (keep the receipts attached)
3. Log labour: hours worked times your true hourly cost
4. Add the extras: hire, tip fees, subbies
5. Compare cost to value - that gap is your profit

A worked example: a small deck

Say you quote a merbau deck at $14,000. Materials come in at $5,200. You and an apprentice put in 90 hours; at a true cost of $70/hr that's $6,300. Hire and tip fees add $400. Total cost: $11,900. Profit: $2,100, or about 15%. Now the useful part - if the job actually takes 120 hours instead of 90, your cost jumps to $14,000 and your profit is gone. Job costing is what shows you that on day three, not at the end.

Doing it without a spreadsheet you'll abandon

Most tradies start a job-costing spreadsheet with good intentions and stop updating it by the second job. The trick is to make logging costs take seconds and happen where the work does - on your phone, on site. When materials and hours go straight onto the job as they happen, the profit figure stays current on its own. That's what TrackYaTradie does: set the job value once, log costs as you go, and see live profit on every job without touching a spreadsheet.