Job costing software
Job costing software for the person who did the job
Most job costing software is built for a contractor running a team, and it asks for cost codes, labour hours and a work in progress report. A sole trader has a narrower question: did that job make money, and is weekend work worth what I charge for it. This answers that one, off the quotes and receipts you already have.
- Per job
- One point per won job, priced against its own recorded materials and subcontractor cost
- Wknd
- Weekday and weekend plotted separately, so the out-of-hours premium is checked rather than assumed
- Blank
- The chart shows nothing at all rather than a number the sample cannot support
Job costing is a different problem when there is one of you
Job costing in the construction sense is a discipline built for firms with staff. You open a cost code, book labour hours and materials against it, carry the balance as work in progress, and reconcile it at the end. It exists because the person pricing the job is not the person doing it, and the gap between them has to be measured.
When you are the person who priced it and the person who did it, that gap does not exist. What you cannot see without help is narrower and more useful: whether the price you quoted survived contact with what the job actually cost.
The number that actually decides something
The figure is plotted as one point per won job, by the date the work happened rather than the date the money arrived. Invoicing dates cluster around the end of the month and hide the pattern; job dates do not.
Margin per job, not margin per month
One point per won job, priced against the materials and subcontractor cost recorded on that job, plotted by the date the work happened rather than the date the invoice was paid.
Weekday against weekend
The same chart split in two, so an out-of-hours premium is something you can check rather than something you assume you are charging.
Typical job value as a median
The middle job, not the average one, so a single unusually large job does not quietly redefine what a normal week looks like.
Costs captured as you buy them
Photograph the receipt at the merchant's counter and it lands against the job, which is the only way the cost figure is ever complete enough to trust.
A job with no recorded cost is not a job that cost nothing
This is the part most costing tools get wrong quietly, and it is worth stating plainly because it changes every number above it.
The practical consequence is that the chart gets more honest the more consistently you capture costs, and it tells you nothing flattering in the meantime. That is the intended behaviour.
The weekend question, answered rather than assumed
Almost every trade charges something extra for weekends and out of hours, and almost nobody checks whether the premium survives the cost side. Weekend jobs are often the emergency ones: the merchant is shut, the part comes from wherever has it, and the margin can be worse than a Tuesday even at a higher price.
So the same chart is drawn twice, weekday against weekend. It is a question you can now answer from your own jobs rather than from a rule of thumb somebody gave you.
| It can show | It cannot show | |
|---|---|---|
| The premium | Whether your weekend jobs actually carry a better margin than your weekday ones | What you ought to charge, which depends on demand you have not measured |
| The sample | How many jobs each half of the split is built on | Anything at all until there are three jobs in each bucket |
Typical job value, and why it is the median
Alongside the margin, the app reports the typical value of a won job as a MEDIAN rather than a mean. One kitchen rewire in a quarter of bathroom jobs would drag a mean upwards and leave you planning a year around a job you may not get again.
The median answers the question people are really asking, which is what a normal job looks like now compared with six months ago.
What has to be in it before any of this appears
None of these figures appear on an empty account, and they do not appear early with a warning attached either.
For the margin chart specifically:
- Five won jobs that have a recorded cost against them
- Three jobs in each of the weekday and weekend buckets before the split is drawn
- Costs recorded on the job itself, which means expenses captured as you go rather than reconstructed later
Recording costs against jobs and reading the reports are both Pro features. The free tier runs 3 quotes and 3 invoices a month, end to end: build the quote, send the PDF, let the customer approve it in the portal, and invoice it. The AI pricing and description tools, expense tracking, certificate filing and reports are Pro. The HMRC year-end tools are Pro + Tax.
What this deliberately does not do
The refusals are as much the point as the features, because they are what keeps the figures defensible.
- No cost codes, no work in progress, no percentage complete. Those exist to track a job across several people, and there is one of you
- No labour hours booked against jobs. A sole trader keeping honest timesheets on themselves is a discipline almost nobody sustains, and a figure built on patchy time data is worse than none
- No team features, no shared diary, no dispatch
- No accounting ledger. This works out what jobs made; it is not a set of books and it does not replace your accountant
The costing is a by-product of running the jobs
Quote from the van, photograph the receipt at the merchant's counter, invoice the day the work is done. The margin figure assembles itself out of that, which is the only way the cost side is ever complete enough to be worth reading.
The figures described here are worked out from the jobs, quotes, invoices and costs you record, and they are only ever as complete as that record. They are a management view of your own history, not an accounting statement, and they are not a substitute for advice from an accountant.
Frequently asked questions
What is job costing?
Working out what an individual job actually made, rather than what the business made over a month. You take the price the customer paid and subtract what that specific job cost you to do: materials, and anything you paid a subcontractor. What is left is the margin on that job. For a sole trader the labour is your own time, so it is usually left out of the cost side and the margin is what your day is worth.
Do I need job costing software as a sole trader?
You need the number. Whether you need software for it depends on how many jobs you do. Below roughly one job a week a notebook is honestly fine. The point at which it stops working is not the volume of jobs, it is that the receipts and the invoices live in different places, so reconstructing the cost side means going through a bank statement months later and guessing which purchase belonged to which job.
How is job costing different for a small trade business?
Most job costing software is built for a contractor running a team, so it is organised around cost codes, work in progress and labour hours booked against a project. A sole trader has none of those problems. The questions that actually decide something are narrower: did that job make money, is weekend work worth what you charge for it, and is the typical job getting bigger or smaller.
Can I do job costing in a spreadsheet?
Yes, and plenty of people do. The spreadsheet is not usually where it fails. It fails at the receipt: a roll of them in the van, some faded, some for two jobs at once, entered weeks later if at all. Any costing method is only as good as how completely the costs got captured, which is why the capture matters more than the calculation.
What is job tracking software?
The term usually covers where a job is up to: quoted, accepted, booked, done, invoiced, paid. That is a different question from what the job made, though the two are worth having in one place, because the status is what tells you a job is finished and therefore ready to be costed at all.
Does it work out my hourly rate?
Not directly, and deliberately. The app does not ask you to log hours against jobs, because a sole trader keeping accurate timesheets on themselves is a discipline almost nobody sustains, and a figure built on patchy time data is worse than no figure. What it works out instead is revenue per available working day, which uses the working pattern you set rather than time you have to remember to record.
Why is my margin chart empty?
No figure is shown on a sample too small to support it. Where there is too little history the card renders nothing, rather than a number with a caveat underneath it.
Does My Job Goblin tell me whether I am actually making money?
Yes, and that is the half most job software leaves out. It records the quote and the invoice like anything else, then does the arithmetic on top: revenue per available working day, margin per job against materials and subcontractor cost, quote win rate with the range it could really be, and how long customers take to pay weighted by the size of the invoice. Turnover on its own hides all four. No figure is shown on a sample too small to support it. Where there is too little history the card renders nothing, rather than a number with a caveat underneath it.
What is revenue per available working day?
It is what a day of your available time earned, rather than what you charged for a day you worked. Take the money received in a period and divide it by the working days that period held, from the working pattern you set. Hotels have measured this for decades as revenue per available room, because a room nobody booked is revenue that can never be recovered. A Tuesday you did not fill is exactly the same thing. My Job Goblin decomposes it the way a hotel does, into your effective day rate multiplied by your utilisation, so you can see which of the two moved.
Does it compare my prices against other tradespeople?
No, and that is deliberate. There is no benchmarking against other businesses. Trades publish no prices, day rates or availability in any machine-readable form, so a peer comparison in this market is either a very small sample or an invented one. Every figure compares a trader against their own history. A benchmark against a handful of unrepresentative businesses, or against a number nobody can source, is worse than no benchmark at all.
How much does it cost?
Pro is £29 a month or £290 a year, with no per-seat fees and no contract. Every new account starts on a 14 day free trial of Pro with no card needed, and drops to the free tier rather than switching off. The free tier runs 3 quotes and 3 invoices a month, end to end: build the quote, send the PDF, let the customer approve it in the portal, and invoice it. The AI pricing and description tools, expense tracking, certificate filing and reports are Pro. The HMRC year-end tools are Pro + Tax.
Why is the free tier so small?
The cap is small on purpose. A free tier big enough to run a trade on has to be paid for by the traders who do pay, and they are one-person businesses on a flat £29 a month with no per-seat fee. What the free tier proves is the whole loop rather than the volume: build the quote, send it, let the customer approve it, invoice it.