Ran the numbers on a few dozen jobs across different trades this year, and the pattern is almost always the same: the job that felt like the good one wasn't, and the one everyone dreaded actually paid the best.

Here's why. Most contractors price a job off the bid, then move on to the next one the second it's done. Nobody goes back and reconciles what it actually cost — the extra day of labor when a sub no-showed, the material waste from a bad cut list, the overhead that never gets allocated to anything.

A rough rule that holds up across trades: if you're not tracking true job cost (labor hours at actual rate, materials at actual spend, allocated overhead), your gut feeling about which jobs are profitable is right maybe half the time. That's a coin flip deciding which type of work you chase next quarter.

The fix isn't complicated — it's just tedious, which is why most people skip it:

1. Every job gets a running tally: labor hours × rate, material receipts, sub invoices

2. Overhead (truck, insurance, tools, admin time) gets allocated per job, not lumped into "expenses"

3. Compare against the bid after the job closes, not before

Do this for even 90 days and you'll know exactly which jobs, clients, and job types to say yes to — and which ones are quietly costing you money to win.

If tracking this yourself sounds like the last thing you want to add to your week, that's literally what we built Job Costing Pro to take off your plate.