Job Costing for Trade Businesses: Know Your Real Margin on Every Job

Ask most trade business owners what they made on their last job and you'll get the invoice total. Ask what it cost to deliver — labour hours, materials, fuel, the second trip to the supplier — and the answer is usually a shrug. That gap is where profitable businesses quietly go broke.

The three numbers per job

Job costing is just three numbers tracked honestly: what you charged (the quote), what you spent on labour (real hours × real cost rates, including your own time), and what you spent on materials. Revenue minus those costs, per job, tells you which work is worth chasing and which quotes need repricing.

Line-item margin is where it gets powerful

Whole-job margin tells you something went wrong; line-item margin tells you what. If you allowed $6,000 for driveway blocks and the receipts total $4,850, that line made $1,150. If your 'labour — install' line keeps running over, your hourly estimate is wrong, not your luck. Linking each supplier receipt to the quote line it belongs to turns every job into pricing feedback.

Make it automatic or it won't happen

Nobody keys receipts into a spreadsheet after a ten-hour day. In Taskr, your crew photographs the receipt on site — AI reads the supplier, GST and total, links it to the job and quote line, and the job's live margin updates instantly. Timesheet hours are costed at each worker's real rate automatically. At the end of the job you see the exact profit — and at BAS time, every receipt is already in Xero.