Track job profitability

This guide explains how to track the profitability of your jobs. Monitoring profitability helps you understand which jobs are most successful so you can price future work with confidence.

Job profitability is the difference between the income you earn from a job and the costs you incur to deliver it. By tracking this, you can see in real-time which jobs, services, or clients are the most financially successful for your business.

Before you start

• You need permissions to view financial reporting. This is available to Admin roles by default.
• Your organization must be on the Pro or Ultra plan to access profitability tracking.
• You must set cost rates for your staff members to calculate labor costs accurately.
• The job needs tracked time or added expenses to calculate costs.

Set staff cost rates

Your largest job cost is often labor. To track it accurately, you first need to set an internal cost rate for each staff member. This rate represents how much a staff member's time costs your business per hour.

1. Navigate to Settings → Staff Members.
2. Select the staff member you want to update.
3. Open the Permissions & Pay tab.
4. In the Labor & Overhead section, enter an amount in the Cost Rate field.
5. Click Save Staff Member.

💡 Tip: A cost rate should include more than just salary. For a true cost, consider adding a portion of your business overhead like benefits, software, and rent into this hourly figure.

Track costs on a job

Costs on a job come from two sources: labor from time entries and materials from expenses. Labor costs are calculated automatically whenever a staff member with a cost rate tracks time against the job.

You add material costs or other non-labor expenses manually.

1. Open the job you want to add an expense to.
2. Select the Costs tab.
3. Click Add Expense.
4. Fill in the details for the expense, such as the Description and Total Cost.
5. If you plan to pass this cost on to your client, check the Billable box. This makes it available to add to an invoice.
6. Click Save Expense.

View job profitability

Once you have income on a job (from a quote or invoice) and have tracked costs, you can view its profitability. This information is available directly on the job's main page.

1. Navigate to Jobs and select a job from the list.
2. On the job overview page, locate the Profitability panel.
3. Review the summary of the job's financial performance.

The Profitability panel gives you a live look at your job's financial health. It includes the following metrics:

Good to know

• Profitability data updates in real-time as you track time and add expenses.
• Updating a staff member's cost rate does not recalculate costs on past time entries. The new rate applies only to time entries created after the change.
• Jobs without a quoted or invoiced value will show $0 for Income. The profit and margin will appear as negative values based on your tracked costs.
• Expenses marked as Billable are always included in Total Costs. When you invoice a billable expense, the amount is added to the job's Income.

What's next

• Creating quotes
• Tracking time on a job
• Creating and managing expenses
• Using the Job Status Report