Pricing & Margin
Without job costing, your profitable jobs are guesses.
Allocate labor, equipment, materials, and overhead to every quote. Then you actually know which jobs make money.
The five inputs
Every estimate. Every time.
- 01
Direct labor
Crew hours times your loaded labor rate. Not the wage. The burdened cost per productive hour.
- 02
Materials
Every line item, with markup applied. No freebies and no rounding down.
- 03
Equipment time
Truck hours times an hourly equipment cost. Fuel, maintenance, depreciation, insurance.
- 04
Overhead allocation
A percentage of revenue or hours that covers rent, admin, software, insurance, the office.
- 05
Target margin
The gross margin you need this job to clear. Apply it after the cost stack, not before.
Worked example
A tree job, fully costed.
6 crew hours times $65 loaded = $390 labor. Disposal: $120. 5 hours of bucket truck times $40 = $200. Overhead at 22% of $710 = $156. Total cost: $866.
At 40% gross margin, the price is $1,443. Most shops quote this job at $900 and then wonder where the money went.
If the price doesn’t come from the cost stack, you’re not pricing, you’re guessing.
Where to build it
CRM, spreadsheet, or estimating software. Just build it.
ServiceTitan, Jobber, Housecall Pro, and Arborgold all support job costing. So does a basic Google Sheet. The tool matters less than the discipline of running every quote through the same stack the same way, every single time.
The bottom line
Cost it first. Then price it.
A job costing system is the difference between knowing your numbers and hoping they work out.