Job costing is the process of tracking all costs — labor, materials, subcontractors, equipment, and overhead — against individual projects. It's the only way to know your true profit margin on each job, not just your overall company profitability.
Without job costing, you might be busy and think you're making money, but you can't see that three of your ten active jobs are actually losing money and dragging down the profitable ones. You can't improve your bidding because you don't know which types of work are most profitable. You can't catch cost overruns until the job is done and the damage is already in your bank account.
With proper job costing, you have weekly visibility into every project's financial health. You see problems early enough to fix them — whether that means having a conversation with your GC about a change order, reallocating labor, or adjusting your approach on remaining work.
We establish cost codes that align with your estimating categories. When your actual costs map directly to your bid categories, you can compare real performance against estimates in real time. Typical codes include: direct labor by trade, materials by category, subcontractor costs, equipment rental, and allocated overhead.
Every week, we review actual costs against budget on all active jobs. We calculate cost-to-complete estimates, projected final margins, and flag any jobs trending over budget. You get a simple report showing green/yellow/red status on every project — no accounting degree required to understand it.
When costs exceed estimates, we dig into why. Is it a labor productivity issue? Material price increases? Scope creep without a change order? Understanding the 'why' is what turns job costing from a reporting exercise into a management tool that actually saves you money.