The same job, costed two ways
What the screen shows when labour is missing, and what it shows when it is not.
Labour not costed
Consumer unit change — Flat 3
- Invoiced
- £1,240.00
- Materials
- £318.40
- Expenses & consumables
- £46.10
- Labour
- not recorded
What the job made
At least £875.50
before labour
Margin: —
No percentage is shown, because any percentage here would be fiction.
Labour costed
Consumer unit change — Flat 3
- Invoiced
- £1,240.00
- Materials
- £318.40
- Expenses & consumables
- £46.10
- Labour — 9.5h @ £28
- £266.00
What the job made
£609.50
after everything
Margin: 49.2%
Shown because every number behind it is real.
Same job, same invoice. The only difference is whether anyone recorded the hours. The old version of this screen would have reported a 74% margin on the left-hand job and marked it reliable.
What's included
It refuses to flatter you
If labour has not been costed you get “at least £X, before labour” and no percentage. A margin figure appears only when the numbers behind it are real. A flattering margin is worse than none, because it becomes next quarter’s price list.
The costs nobody line-items
Skips, tip runs, fuel, parking, gloves and bin bags go against the job as expenses. A consumables percentage catches the rest. These are the costs that quietly turn a good job into a break-even one.
Cost per hour, not charge-out rate
What a person costs you — wage, NI, pension, van, phone — set per member. Putting the charge-out rate here is the classic error and it makes every job look like a loss.
Money in, money out, owed onward
Four questions answered plainly: what came in, what went out, what you owe onward including CIS deductions, and what the work itself made.
Locked to the people who should see it
Finance is a role, not a side effect of being in the business. Enforced in the database, so an engineer opening the page gets no rows rather than a page you forgot to hide.
A period of zeros is allowed to be true
If nothing was invoiced, zero is the right answer. The screen tells you when a period is empty but the business has data elsewhere, so nobody reports a working page as broken.
Job Costing & Profit — your questions
Is this accounting software?
No, and we will not pretend otherwise. There is no ledger, no double entry and no bank feed. It answers the two questions a trade actually needs answered — am I making money, and on what — and it is not a substitute for a bookkeeper or your VAT return.
Why is my margin blank?
Because labour has not been costed on that job, so any percentage would be fiction. Set a cost per hour for the people involved and record the time, and the margin appears. Until then you get the floor: at least this much, before labour.
Do you track time?
Not yet, and that is an honest gap. Labour can be entered as an estimate, and when it is, the figure is recorded and shown as estimated rather than actual, so you always know which kind of number you are looking at.
Can my engineers see the profit on their jobs?
Only if you give them the role. Finance visibility used to follow membership, which meant anyone added to the business could read the P&L. It is now a specific permission and the data simply is not returned to anyone without it.