Job costing is the practice of tracking every dollar spent on a specific job, so you can compare it to what you billed. Most contractors that 'feel' busy but aren't getting ahead financially are losing money on a few specific jobs and don't realize it. Job costing surfaces the truth.
Add up your monthly fixed costs (insurance, software, truck, phone, office, accountant). Divide by your billable hours per month to get an overhead per labor hour. Add that to every job's labor cost when computing true profit.
Most contractors run 15-30% of revenue in overhead. If you're not assigning it per job, you're flying blind on profitability.
A job that quotes for style="max-width:780px;margin:0 auto;padding:48px 24px;font-family:system-ui,-apple-system,sans-serif;line-height:1.55;color:#0f172a"0,000 with 80 expected hours can become a losing job if it takes 130 hours instead. Without tracking time per job, you'll never know — you'll just feel busy and broke.
Software like FieldKrew lets the crew clock into a specific job, so labor hours get assigned automatically and the per-job P&L updates as the job progresses.
Quarterly, sort jobs by profit margin and look at your bottom 10%. What did they have in common? Same customer type? Same scope of work? Same crew? Same season? Patterns tell you what to stop bidding on.
Not strictly — a spreadsheet works. But the moment you have more than 2-3 active jobs, software pays for itself in time saved and accuracy.
Weekly during a job (catch overruns early), and monthly across all closed jobs for the trend view.