Job costing
Job costing is working out what an individual job actually cost you, rather than what the whole month cost. It adds labour hours at their real rate, parts and materials consumed, subcontractor charges and travel, then compares that total against what you invoiced to give the margin on that job.
What goes into a job cost
Four things: labour, materials, subcontractors and travel. Labour is hours on the job multiplied by the true cost of that technician, which is their wage plus employer contributions, not their hourly rate on a payslip.
Travel is the one most often left out, and on a business running short calls across a metro it is not small. If two hours of a technician's day is driving, that time is a cost that belongs to the jobs they drove between.
Why the monthly view hides the problem
A profitable month can contain unprofitable work. If the profitable jobs are subsidising a category that consistently loses money, the monthly figure will never tell you, and you will keep selling the losing category.
Costing at job level is how you find out that callouts under a certain value never cover their own travel, or that one client's site is far more expensive to serve than their rate assumes.
Making it practical
Make it practical by capturing the inputs during the work rather than reconstructing them later. Time booked against the job, parts issued to the job, and the quote value all need to land on the same record automatically.
Omni Field ties time entries, materials and stock consumption to the job they belong to, carries the quoted value through to the invoice, and reports on job and client profitability so you can see which work and which customers actually pay.
Common questions
See it in the product
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