Measuring profitability is crucial for business growth. That's why Housecall Pro offers Job Costing, making it easier than ever to track and report the costs associated with each job.

Job Costing simplifies tracking expenses and profits by letting you meticulously monitor costs like labor, materials, miscellaneous expenses, commissions, and services. Its comprehensive reporting capabilities allow for a detailed analysis of job costs and profit margins, aiding in informed decision-making for business growth.

This step-by-step guide ensures you have everything you need to navigate and utilize the Job Costing tool effectively.

Job Costing involves multiple areas that help calculate and provide the necessary information to ensure each job generates profit.

To start using job costing, you'll first need to enable the Job Costing Breakdown feature in your Housecall Pro account. You can then enable additional tracking settings to maximize your job calculations (covered in the sections below).

To enable the job costing breakdown:

Tracking labor costs lets you know exactly how much each job costs in terms of labor, factoring in travel time and employee-specific costs.

To track labor costs, the following features need to be toggled on/in use:

Once fully loaded rates are assigned to employees and they track their time on the jobs they're assigned to, their fully loaded rate will be multiplied by the time spent on the job (including travel time) to calculate actual labor costs.

To enable time tracking for Job Costing:

To accurately calculate labor costs, you'll need to configure your employees' fully loaded rates by entering their pay details in Housecall Pro.

A fully loaded rate includes the base hourly rate of an employee + any additional employer-paid costs, multiplied by the time on the job.

Follow these steps to set up your employees' fully loaded rates:

To access the fully loaded rate calculator:

To use the fully loaded rate calculator:

Materials costs are another important cost category to track. Keeping tight control over and tracking material costs ensures that your pricing reflects the real expenses that are associated with each job. This is crucial to avoid undercharging and a loss of profit.

To get the most out of tracking material costs, you'll want to enable the following features:

Building out your Price Book with the common materials you use will make it easier to track the materials going into your jobs.

To track costs for material line items:

If you want to track materials outside of line items in a way that doesn't impact the price of your job, you can do so by enabling the Material Job Inputs setting.

When this setting is enabled, you'll see a Job Inputs card on the Job Details page (via the HCP web portal and mobile app) where material items can be added. These materials will not show up on the invoice or impact the price of the job.

To track material job inputs:

You can also auto-populate material job inputs when flat-rate services that have materials added to them are added to a job.

Tracking miscellaneous costs helps you maintain a detailed record of job-related expenses that don’t fall under labor or materials, such as permits, parking, and rental fees, to name a few. This approach gives you a complete view of job costs, enabling better financial management and more accurate budgeting.

To track miscellaneous costs separately from line items, you'll need to enable the "Miscellaneous Job Inputs" Job Costing setting in your account. Once activated, you can track these costs via the HCP web portal and mobile app. These costs won’t affect the invoice or job price.

To enable the Miscellaneous Job Inputs setting:

If you have a performance pay structure for your employees, you can turn on tracking for commission costs, which will allow you to assign commission rates to your employees. Once you've enabled commission tracking and added commission rates, you can assign commissionable line items to employees on jobs.

Commissions are calculated by multiplying the commissionable amount of line items by the assigned employee's commission rate.

Learn how to set up your commission rates in our Help Article, "Using Commission on the Job."

Please note:

You can use the unit cost field on service line items to track service costs. However, tracking the actual costs of labor, materials, miscellaneous expenses, and commissions will provide a more accurate breakdown of your job costs and margins.

Scroll down to the "Expected vs. Actual Costs" section to learn how to track service costs as expected vs. actual job costs.

When pricing your services, you may factor in anticipated labor, materials, and other costs to ensure the service is priced profitably. This is particularly important if you use flat-rate pricing.

With the "Show expected job costs" setting enabled, the unit cost of any service line item on a job is treated as an expected cost and shown under the Expected Costs section of the Job Costing Breakdown on the Job Details page.
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Material line items or inputs, miscellaneous inputs, commissions, and labor tracked on the job from time tracking will be calculated as actual job costs and are shown in the top section of the Job Costing Breakdown.

Job Costing Breakdown explained:

If you'd like to report on expected vs. actual job costs to stay on top of your margins and adjust pricing as needed, you can do so by enabling the "Show expected job costs" setting in your Job Costing settings.

Follow these steps to enable tracking of expected job costs:

Reporting on job costs and profit margins helps you see if you're making enough money from each job. It guides pricing, budgeting, and overall business management for greater success.

As you track revenue and costs on your jobs, you'll be able to analyze your job costs and profit margins from the Job Details page and in job reports. If you're tracking expected vs actual job costs, you'll be able to report on expected margins, profits, and costs vs actuals as well.

The following metrics are available by expanding the Job Costing Breakdown on the Job Details page:

Aggregate Job Costing reporting is available in the Reporting tab of Housecall Pro.

To view the aggregate reports:

The Job Costing Margins permission controls access to the job costing breakdown on jobs and related reports. By default, this permission is enabled for Admins and Office Staff employees, allowing them to view job costing information for each job.

With Job Costing enabled you'll be able to track basic unit costs on service and material line items, along with the expected profit margin on estimates.

If you are uploading Price Book items through an Excel or .CSV file, you must enter the cost info into a column titled "cost."

Prefer to use a template? We made it easy by including a column for Cost already! You'll just need to enter the cost before uploading or sending it to our team for upload.

To use the Price Book data import template:

To edit Job Costing details on a job/invoice:

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