Know what a job costs before you price it
Plenty of busy firms are quietly losing money on jobs they think are profitable, because nobody's added up what the work actually costs before setting the price.
Where it hurts
Pricing by feel works until it doesn't. You quote a number that sounds about right, win the job, and only find out months later, if ever, whether you made anything on it.
Materials creep up. Labour takes longer than you guessed. The van, the subbie, the bit you had to buy twice. None of it makes it into the quote in a proper way, so your margin is a mystery and your "good" jobs might be your worst ones.
Then a big enquiry comes in, the sort that could make or break the quarter, and you're pricing it on gut instinct because you've no real handle on your costs.
What I'd build
I'd build you a job-costing setup that adds up the real cost of a job (materials, labour hours, subcontractors, overhead) before you put a price on it, shows the margin at the number you're minded to quote, and flags when a job's being priced too thin. The maths stays plain arithmetic from your own rates; the AI earns its keep feeding it. As supplier invoices land, an AI step reads them, spots when a material's price has moved and proposes the rate update for you to approve, so you're never quoting from last year's costs. Afterwards it compares quoted against actual on each job and points at where the money went, so your pricing sharpens every time. It sits alongside Xero or QuickBooks so the numbers match your accounts.
What changes
- Every quote priced from your real costs, not a guess
- Material price rises spotted in supplier invoices, with updates to approve
- See your margin before you commit to a number
- Quoted-versus-actual shows exactly where each job leaked money
Related fixes
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