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How do you calculate your baseline price before sending a quote out?
When you look at a job site, how are you actually building your estimates? Are you pricing based on true operational costs and target profit margins, or are you matching local competitors and hoping there is money left over at the end of the month? Knowing your numbers comes down to a few key questions: What is your true hourly overhead rate? (Total monthly fixed overhead divided by total monthly billable hours) Are you calculating margin or markup? (Markup on cost is not the same as gross profit margin. If you want a 30% margin, multiplying your costs by 1.30 leaves you short at 23%.) What is your minimum shop rate before pulling a rig out of the driveway? How are you handling this in your business?Are You Building a Business or Just Creating Yourself Another Job?
It’s easy as a small business owner to get caught up doing everything yourself. At what point do you start delegating, hiring, or putting systems in place so the business can operate without you being involved in every job? I’d love to hear how other owners are making that transition while still keeping quality and customer service high.Those who charge for inspections, do you have a flat rate or does it depend on the property?
I recently got a request for a rodent assessment for a house that is about 10,000 sqft, an absolute monster of a house with 6 levels, a 4 car garage (buddy has a McLaren 750S, Porsche 917, Ford GT and a Range Rover!!!), vehicle lifts, elevator, separate chef kitchen, indoor pool...the works! I told the homeowner my standard fee for a more modest sized house, and that I would have to triple that to be able to spend the time at their home and not feel rushed. They did agree and made no issue out of it but it did make me wonder how other people approach this. Then I found the issue areas and they were about 3-4 times as many as a regular house and the cost reflected that. More doors, vents, cracks, holes, utility lines...it was insane. Should I have kept the inspection charge the same knowing I would find many many more holes or was it smart to up the inspection charge?
How do you actually track job profitability (not just revenue)?
Quick question for other Jobber users — when you want to actually know how profitable a job was (after labor and expenses, not just the invoice total), or how your crew's utilization looks over a month, how do you currently figure that out? Pulling into Excel? A separate spreadsheet? Just gut feel? I'm curious whether this is a real pain point or if I'm overthinking it — trying to understand how people actually track profitability day to day.How much do you trust the numbers your bookkeeper is giving you?
One of the things I’ve learned as we’ve grown is that having a bookkeeper and having a GOOD bookkeeper are two very different things. Clean books aren’t just about taxes. If things are being categorized incorrectly, reconciliations aren’t happening properly, or your financials are months behind, you can be making major decisions based on numbers that aren’t even accurate. Revenue can look great while profit tells a completely different story. And as an owner, you shouldn’t have to become a bookkeeper—but you do need financials you can actually use to run the business. I’m curious how other owners handle this: How involved are you in reviewing your financials, and what reports or numbers do you look at regularly to know your bookkeeper is actually giving you an accurate picture of the business?
💡FEATURE REQUEST: Price Increases in Products & Services List
Do you increase prices for ongoing customers? Do you know how long it takes me to increase my prices for 700 ongoing clients in my cleaning business? Whether you increase your prices on an annual basis or just as needed in these unpredictable times, it would be easier to make these changes en masse in the Products and Services tab! How would it work? When editing a product or service line item in the Products & Services List, there should be an option to carry that modification over to any existing Jobs that have that line item on it. Currently, this would only update for new jobs created, but I'd love to see a little pop-up that says, "Would you like to change the price for existing Jobs with this line item? Yes/No" Use Case Example: Because I am in the cleaning industry, it will be my primary use case. Let's say you have a minimum price that every client's rate will be at or above. When you create a new job for a recurring customer, you add a line item titled "Minimum Rate + current year," like for 2020: "Minimum Rate 2020," which is $150. You also add another line item based on how your pricing model is set up - in this case, I will use a simple one: "Small House" for $10 "Medium House" for $30 "Large House" for $50 When it's time for your prices to increase, consider the following options: you could decide to raise prices only for people with large houses and keep your minimum rate the same, or you may want to increase the cost for clients who have been with you for more than 5 years. Instead of making this change one client at a time and trying to sort through who the change applies to, I could go to the Products and Services List and find the specific line item I want to modify. Then, I could edit the price in there! Ta Da! You've raised your prices! Why should Jobber care? This would be huge for any business industry that has recurring clients. ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, and other competitors already have this feature. I have found other threads that mention something like this or frustrations with how to go about raising prices. This would allow businesses that only see customers once or twice a year to set up their customers as recurring with one Job, saving them a lot of time and effort as well. You'd have at least one very loyal customer in me! I've spoken to two support agents who thought this was a simple but fantastic idea! My next price increase is in June, and I'd love you guys if you saved me weeks worth of work in a single click 🤞🙏 QUESTIONS, COMMENTS, FEEDBACK, AND MORE USE CASES WELCOME!!What marketing channel works best for you right now???
Hello, We are currently evaluating our marketing strategy to improve lead consistency and build deeper community trust. While we currently use Yelp, we find the results inconsistent and often attract price-shoppers rather than long-term clients. :( Moving forward, I would like to pivot our focus toward community-based marketing, such as sponsoring local schools and Little League teams. These sponsorships build the kind of long-term goodwill and trust that ensures local homeowners think of us first during emergencies. To clarify our strategy, we are avoiding the following channels: - Lead Aggregators (Angi, Networx, HomeAdvisor): These platforms sell the same lead to multiple contractors. The requirement to respond within seconds to avoid losing the job—while still being charged—does not align with our workflow. - Yelp for Major Projects: Due to high cost-per-click metrics and a high volume of price-sensitive inquiries, we find this to be a low-return channel for larger plumbing jobs. Your Friendly Neighborhood Plumbers,What’s Your Target Gross Margin vs. Actual Net Margin? Let’s Benchmark.
In home services and contracting, top-line revenue gets all the attention, but net profit pays the bills. Many trade operators aim for a 40–50% gross profit margin to retain a healthy 15–20% net margin, but actual figures vary significantly based on team size and trade complexity. A standard healthy benchmark breakdown often looks like: Cost of Goods Sold (Direct Labor + Materials): 50–60% of revenue Overhead & Operating Expenses: 25–30% of revenue Net Profit Target: 15–20% of revenue I’d love to benchmark with the community: Are you hitting your target net margins consistently as you scale, or is overhead creeping up faster than revenue? Where are you seeing the biggest pressure on your margins today?
PROPERTY BASED PRICING
Changing pricing across the board is very time consuming. a few requests. Let the service and product catalog create a proper pricing matrix, to allow mass changes. Example: i do lawn care. after tracking everything and running the numbers i charge by sq ft. of the entire property. (factors in the trimming time better than just the lawn size) there are tiers for the pricing 0-10999 $50 11000-12999 $53 and .001 for ea sq ft over the min 13000-14999 $55 and .002501 for ea sq ft over the min etc etc etc. Im **bleep** about the numbers and almost every time i don't follow the formula i will lose money. What im looking for is something like this for the product catalog. You open up the the catalog and either put a blanket price on it that always populates or build that service or products pricing matrix, that then pulls whatever it needs from the clients page in my case property sq ft. runs it through the pricing matrix and spits out the number for that particular service. and yes we can always change it individually when needed byt this would put the pricing in the ballpark. and when sending out renewal letters, this cuts down hours and hours of work as its in house. when you need to change the pricing as everything goes up or down, you go adjust the pricing matrix, not every single clients page. For my treatment side of things, the lawn size is what matters, so the matrix would pull that number off the client page. I do christmas lights, i charge per linear foot as a baseline. it pulls that. this is about speeding up quotes going out especially in mass. Basically the sales book of this is what we charge for xyz the sales guy needs to price consistently compared to the other sales guy its in house and not on some seperate excel sheet outside of the CRM.Should customers pay more if they refuse auto-pay?
Auto-pay saves a lot of admin time in a recurring service business. Manual billing sounds simple until invoices sit unpaid, cards fail, reminders pile up, and someone has to decide whether to pause service. That extra follow-up has a cost. I don’t think every customer who avoids auto-pay is a bad customer. Some people just prefer more control. But if one customer requires more billing work every month, should they pay the same price as someone on auto-pay? I’m starting to think manual billing fees make sense. Something simple like: “Auto-pay is included with monthly service. Manual invoice payment is available for an added admin fee.” Do you require auto-pay, charge more for manual billing, or let customers pay however they want?
