Job Costing Calculator

Start by selecting your industry. This loads cost categories that make sense for your trade - HVAC jobs have different line items than roofing jobs. You can always add or remove categories to match your specific job.

Fill in the job details at the top: job name, customer, and date. These show up on the PDF export so you can file it with your job records.

Enter your estimates before you start the job. This is what you quoted or what you expect to spend. Don't skip this step - you can't know if you made money without knowing what you planned to spend.

As the job progresses, fill in the actual costs. Materials invoices, equipment rental receipts, whatever you actually paid. The calculator shows the variance instantly - green means you're under budget, red means over.

The labor section works differently. Enter your estimated hours and actual hours separately, then set your hourly rate. This lets you see labor cost variance based on both time and dollars.

If you entered a sale price, the summary shows your gross profit and margin for both estimated and actual. This is the number that matters - what you actually made after costs.

When the job is done, download the PDF. Keep it with your job file. Over time, these reports show you patterns - which types of jobs make money, which don't, where you consistently underestimate.

Job costing tracks every dollar you spend on a specific job - materials, labor, equipment, permits, everything. When the job is done, you compare what you spent to what you charged. The difference is your actual profit.

This is different from your monthly P&L or your tax returns. Those tell you how the whole business is doing. Job costing tells you how each individual job performed.

Why does that matter? Because not all jobs are created equal. A $15,000 bathroom remodel might make you $4,000. A $15,000 service call blitz might make you $8,000. Without job costing, they both just look like "$15,000 in revenue" - and you have no idea which type of work is actually profitable.

Job costing also catches problems early. If you're consistently over budget on materials for a certain type of job, that's a pricing problem. If labor hours always run 20% over estimate, that's an estimating problem. You can't fix what you can't see.

The contractors who actually know their numbers - not guessing, but actually tracking job by job - make better decisions about which work to chase, how to price it, and where to improve.

"Busy but broke" is the most common problem in trades businesses. The phone rings, trucks roll, invoices go out - but somehow there's nothing left at the end of the month.

Here's why: without job costing, you don't know which jobs made money and which ones lost money. You just see the total. And when you're losing money on 30% of your jobs, the profitable ones have to cover the losses. Eventually, they can't.

The usual culprits:

Underpriced materials. You quoted $800 for parts based on last year's prices. Supplier prices went up 15%. You actually spent $920. That's $120 gone - and you didn't even notice because you never compared estimate to actual.

Labor hour creep. You estimated 6 hours for an install. Took 8 hours because of site conditions. At $50/hour loaded cost, that's $100 you didn't bill for. Do that twice a week for a year and you've lost $10,000.

Hidden costs. Permit fees, dump runs, extra trips for forgotten parts, equipment rental. Small stuff that doesn't seem worth tracking - until you realize it's eating your margins.

Bad pricing on certain job types. Maybe you're great at service calls and terrible at new construction. Without job costing, you don't know. You keep taking construction jobs because they're big numbers, not realizing you lose money on half of them.

Job costing isn't about being a perfectionist. It's about knowing which jobs make you money so you can do more of those and less of the others.