How do you actually track job profitability (not just revenue)?

It's definitely a real pain point—revenue only shows half the picture.

​Right now, the most accurate way within Jobber is using Job Costing (available on the Connect and Grow plans). If your crew logs their time directly against specific jobs using the Jobber app and you enter your material expenses directly on the job, Jobber automatically generates a Job Profitability Report. This compares your quoted total against logged labor costs and tracked expenses to give you a true net margin without needing outside tools.

​If you aren't using Jobber's built-in time tracking or are on the Core plan, most business owners sync Jobber with QuickBooks Online, where labor costs, payroll, and overhead expenses are pulled into a custom Excel spreadsheet or QBO’s Projects feature to calculate true job margins and crew utilization.

​You’re definitely not overthinking it—tracking true job profitability instead of just top-line revenue is what separates a business that's just busy from one that's actually profitable.

We track this outside of Jobber, but our pay structure makes job-level labor profitability a little easier to see.

Our cleaning techs are paid commission (generally 35–43% of the job) so I already know what percentage of revenue is going to direct labor on each job. From there, we look at the bigger picture through our bookkeeping/P&L: payroll burden, supplies, vehicles, insurance, admin payroll, software, etc.

I’m actually much more interested in production rate than just the invoice total. We have a target revenue per labor hour, so if a $300 job consistently takes 6 hours instead of 4, THAT tells me something is wrong even though the job technically brought in $300.

We also look at profitability at the company level monthly rather than trying to assign every tube of toilet bowl cleaner or mile driven to an individual house 😂

For us, it’s a combination of commission %, revenue per labor hour, and overall company margins. Jobber gives us a lot of the operational data, but our bookkeeping is where I’m ultimately looking to see whether all of it is translating into actual profit.

One thing I would track is callbacks or having to go back and fix something. A job can look profitable when it is first completed but one extra trip can change that pretty quickly. I would want that extra time tied back to the original job so I can see the real profit.

Are you working with an accountant or are you trying to tackle this on your own?

Adding one number and one check that usually get missed even with Job Costing set up.

The number is drive time. An hour of driving costs the same wage as an hour on site, but it almost never gets logged against the job, so route-heavy days look more profitable than they really were. If the crew clocks in when they leave the shop instead of when they arrive, that mostly fixes it without any extra admin.

The check is jobs marked complete that never got invoiced. Worth a quick pass once a month, because that money never shows up as a bad margin on any report. It just never arrives.

And agreed with the others, you're not overthinking it.

We use jobber costing for real time "how are we doing" then check the overall against quick books. 

A lot of businesses seem to struggle with this especially when labor and other job costs are not tracked consistently. Excel or spreadsheets can work, but they often become time consuming and difficult to maintain. Having job profitability and crew utilization available in one place would definitely make day to day decision making easier.