Know which jobs made money.
Most contractors find out a job lost money after it closes. By then the crew is already on the next one, priced the same way.
Job costing is not a report you pull at year end. It is something the office updates every week.
Why your P&L doesn't tell you which jobs made money
A profit and loss statement adds everything together. Good jobs cover bad jobs and the average looks acceptable.
Until cost is tracked at the job level, you are pricing the next bid off a number that hides the one that hurt you.
What a working job costing setup tracks
Four things, and they have to tie back to the same job number.
- Contract value plus approved change orders, not the original contract alone.
- Labor hours and burdened labor cost by job.
- Material and equipment cost coded to the job, not to a general bucket.
- Subcontractor commitments and what has actually been billed against them.
Costing at the job level, week by week
The office updates status once a week: percent complete, billed to date, cost to date, and what is left to bill.
That one weekly pass is what turns job costing from a year-end exercise into something you can act on while the job is still open.
The tools we use for it
The Weekly Job Status & Billing Tracker runs the weekly pass. The Change Order Tracker keeps approved work from falling out of the contract value.
The full bundle ties both to the file structure so job records live in one place.
Stop guessing on the next bid.
The trackers are built and ready to use. Add your jobs and the numbers are there next week.
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