Pricing Jobs So
You Know They're Profitable.

Why "I'm busy" doesn't tell you anything

A full diary feels like success, but it can quietly hide jobs that are losing you money, if the quote was too low, the materials cost more than expected, or the job ran long. Without checking, you can't tell a genuinely good job from one you'd be better off not repeating.

Job costing is just comparing what a job actually made against what it actually cost, per job, not just across the business as a whole at year end.

The three numbers that matter

• What you quotedThe price you agreed with the customer before starting.
• What you actually invoicedSometimes different from the quote if the scope changed, this is the number that matters, not the original estimate.
• What the job actually cost youMaterials, subcontractor or labour costs, and a reasonable allowance for your own time.

The gap between the second and third numbers is your real margin on that job. Do this across a handful of jobs and patterns show up fast, certain types of work, certain customers, or certain material-heavy jobs often turn out less profitable than they feel in the moment.

The habit that makes this easy

You don't need software or a spreadsheet you'll abandon in a fortnight. The only real requirement is tagging costs to the job they belong to at the point they happen, a line on a receipt, a note on a WhatsApp photo, the job address or the customer's name is usually enough.

Everything else, pulling it together into an actual profit-per-job picture, is admin work that can sit with whoever's doing your books, not something you need to build yourself.