A job profitability report that shows which jobs make you money
A full diary can hide a thin margin. The scary bit is that most firms genuinely don't know which of their jobs make money and which ones cost them to do.
Where it hurts
At the year end your accountant tells you whether the business made money overall. That's a single number, months late, with no clue about which work drove it. So you keep taking on the sort of job that feels busy but barely washes its face.
The costs are all there, they're just scattered. Materials on one invoice, subcontractor on another, your own time nowhere at all. Pulling them together per job by hand is such a slog that nobody does it.
Once you can see it job by job, the picture is usually blunt. A type of work you love turns out to lose money. A boring one is carrying the whole firm. That changes what you say yes to.
What I'd build
I'd tie your costs back to individual jobs so each one shows a real margin: materials and subcontractor bills from Xero or QuickBooks, labour from your job sheets, and a sensible figure for your own time. The reason nobody does this by hand is the matching, so that's where the AI step goes: it reads each supplier invoice as it arrives, works out which job it belongs to from the reference, the address or the materials on it, and files it there for a quick yes or no from you. The result is a simple view: this job made this much, that type of work runs at this margin, and the next quote gets priced from what the last one actually cost.
What changes
- A real margin on each job, not one number at year end
- Costs matched to jobs by an AI step, confirmed with a quick yes or no
- Spot the work that quietly loses money before you take on more
- Price the next quote from what the last one actually cost
Related fixes
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