What a job actually cost you, and why the invoice doesn’t tell you

Ask a tradie which of last month’s jobs made the most money and you’ll usually get the biggest one. That’s the invoice talking, not the margin.

Four costs that don’t make it into the quote

• •The hours nobody wrote down. The trip back for a part, the phone calls, the extra half-day nobody logged. Unbilled time is the biggest single leak.
• •Materials bought on the run. Paid on the card, coded to general expenses, never tied to a job.
• •Subbies invoiced late. Their bill lands six weeks after you invoiced the client, so the job looked profitable right up until it wasn’t.
• •Rework. Rarely quoted, rarely tracked, always paid for.

What it takes to see it

Job costing isn’t complicated, it’s just consistent. Every hour goes against a job. Every purchase gets a job code at the time it’s made, not reconstructed later. Subbie bills get entered when they arrive and matched back.

Do that for three months and you can see, per job, what you estimated, what you’ve spent, what you’ve invoiced, and what’s still sitting there uninvoiced.

The tools do most of the work

Xero Projects, NextMinute or WorkflowMax will all do this once they’re set up properly and connected to your books. The setup is the part that matters — job codes that make sense, purchases flowing through with the job attached, and time captured on the phone rather than on a scrap of paper.

That’s a day’s work to set up and a habit to keep. Then you stop guessing which work is worth chasing.

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