How to know which jobs actually make you money

Why revenue lies to you

A $2,800 bathroom rough-in feels like a win next to a $300 service call. But quote the rough-in at three days and have it take four and a half, which old houses love to arrange, and your effective rate drops to $62 an hour before materials overruns. Meanwhile the $300 call took 90 minutes door to door, which is $200 an hour.

Without tracking, your gut ranks jobs by invoice size, so you chase more rough-ins and squeeze out the service calls that were quietly funding the business.

Track three numbers per job

Skip job-costing software with burden rates and twelve categories. Per job, you need three numbers: what you quoted, the hours it really took including drive time and supply runs, and what materials really cost including the stuff that got wasted or re-bought.

Hours are where the truth hides, and hours are what nobody writes down. The quote said six, it took nine, and by Friday you remember it as 'about seven'. Memory always shaves hours off bad jobs, which is exactly why the bad jobs keep getting quoted the same way.

Make the hours capture effortless

Tracking fails when it requires a spreadsheet at 9pm. It sticks when logging time takes ten seconds at the job.

DeimLead can build you a time tracker from one sentence, something like 'a time tracker where my crew logs hours against a job name from their phones'. It lives at a link with a real database, so your crew taps in their hours from the truck, no app, no accounts, and every job accumulates its true hours whether or not you were on site. At the end of the job you have real numbers next to the quote instead of a Friday-evening guess.

Read the pattern after ten jobs

Ten tracked jobs is enough to sort into three buckets. Winners: at or above your target rate, go get more of these. Fixable: a specific overrun keeps repeating, so the fix is quoting, add a demolition-surprise buffer to every old-house quote. Losers: job types that miss your rate every single time.

For the losers you have two honest moves: raise the price 25 to 40 percent, or stop taking them. Some customers will pay the corrected price. The ones who will not were never profitable customers, and every hour they used to fill becomes an hour available for the winners at the top of your list.

Start with the next job

Do not reconstruct the past. On your very next job, write down the quote, then log every hour and every receipt until handover. One honestly tracked job will teach you more than a year of bank statements.