What is job costing?
Job costing is tracking every cost, labor hours, materials, equipment time, subs, against a specific job, then comparing the total to what the job billed. It answers the only question that matters at year end: which work actually made money.
Revenue hides things. A busy season with strong billings can still lose money on half its jobs, subsidized by the other half, and without job-level numbers nobody finds out which half is which.
What gets tracked
- Labor: real hours per person per job, at loaded rates (wage plus taxes, insurance, and benefits), not just wage.
- Materials: what was actually used on the job, including the second load of stone nobody wrote down.
- Equipment: machine hours at an hourly cost that covers fuel, wear, and eventual replacement.
- Subs and passthroughs: trucking, disposal fees, permits, rentals.
Why most crews don't do it
Because collecting the data by hand is miserable: time cards in one place, receipts in a shoebox, invoices in another system. The fix is capturing costs where they happen, hours from the clock-in, materials on the job record, and letting the report assemble itself. Then every finished job teaches the next bid something.