How to Calculate Job Costs and Track Profitability Per Project
Job costing is how you find out whether a project actually made money - not what you bid, but what you spent. Without it, a contractor can be fully booked all year and still lose money, because the profitable jobs subsidize the underwater ones invisibly. The problem doesn't announce itself until the bank account runs dry, and by then the root cause is buried inside completed projects that were never tracked line by line.
The process is straightforward: track actual material, labor, equipment, and subcontractor costs against the original estimate, category by category, from the first day of a project to the last. When a job closes, you compare actual to estimated, identify where the variance came from, and use that data to write better estimates on the next job. The BidFlow Job Costing Calculator structures this comparison automatically - this guide explains how to set it up, what the numbers mean, and how to act on what you find.