Job Costing for Contractors
Track costs and profitability by project or job. Know which work actually makes money with detailed reporting built into your accounting system.
What This Is
Standard bookkeeping tells you if your business made money overall. Job costing tells you which specific projects made money and which ones didn’t. For contractors, this difference matters. Two jobs with the same revenue can have completely different profit margins depending on labor hours, material costs, and how many trips back to the site were required.
We set up your QuickBooks to track income and expenses at the job level. Every material purchase, labor hour, and subcontractor invoice gets coded to the right project. When the job closes out, you see exactly what it cost and what you actually made on it.
The Setup Work
The Setup Work
We configure your chart of accounts to capture job-level detail. We create job templates and establish naming conventions that make sense for your operation. We set up classes or projects depending on your QuickBooks version. Then we train you and your team on how to code transactions so the data stays clean.
The Reporting
The Reporting
Monthly job profitability reports showing estimated versus actual costs. Work in progress tracking for active jobs. Completed job analysis so you can see final margins. Reports you can actually use when deciding whether to bid on similar work in the future.
Why This Matters
Every bid you submit is based on assumptions about what the job will cost. Without job costing, those assumptions come from gut feel and fading memory. You think you know how long a bathroom remodel takes. You think you know your material costs on framing jobs. But unless you’re tracking the actual numbers, you’re guessing.
The dangerous pattern is the contractor who stays busy all year but ends up with thin margins or worse. Revenue looks healthy. Cash flow feels tight. The problem is often specific job types that consistently come in over budget, but nobody tracks closely enough to notice.
Blind Bidding
Blind Bidding
You quote a project based on what feels right. Maybe you pad the estimate a little for safety. Maybe you sharpen the pencil to win the bid. Either way, you don’t actually know your costs on similar past jobs because that data was never captured. Every bid is a fresh guess.
Hidden Patterns
Hidden Patterns
Some contractors discover that commercial work is profitable while residential consistently loses money. Others find that jobs over a certain size perform well but smaller projects get eaten up by overhead. These patterns stay invisible without job-level tracking.
What Changes
Bidding becomes informed instead of speculative. You look at your actual costs from the last five kitchen remodels before quoting the next one. You know your labor productivity on similar scope. You know which materials tend to run over estimate and by how much. Your bids get tighter and more accurate over time.
Decision-making improves across the board. When someone asks if you want to bid on a certain type of project, you can pull up your history with that work. If past performance shows thin margins or cost overruns, you can price accordingly or walk away. You stop chasing volume for its own sake.
Profitable Estimating
Profitable Estimating
Historical data from completed jobs feeds into future bids. You see where your estimates were accurate and where they missed. Over time, your estimating improves because you’re working from real numbers instead of assumptions and hope.
Strategic Focus
Strategic Focus
You identify which job types, customer categories, or project sizes generate the best returns. You can intentionally pursue more of that work. Marketing dollars and sales effort get directed toward the work that actually makes money for your business.
Santa Fe's Small Business Bookkeeper
The Next Step:
A Quick Conversation
Tell us about your business and what you're dealing with. We'll listen, ask a few questions, and give you a straightforward quote.
