Know if a job will make money
while you can still fix it.
Set up the job once. Add costs as they come in. The tracker shows you, in real time, where you land if you stop now, finish at this rate, or finish at your original estimate. The halftime alarm the losing job never had.
Step 1: Set up the job
Budget by category
Step 2: How far along are you?
Your honest read on how much of the work is done. This is what turns the costs so far into a finish-line projection.
Step 3: Log costs as they come in
| Category | Note | Amount |
|---|
Step 4: Budget vs actual
The dark line on each bar is your budget. The flag projects each category to the finish line at the current pace. Yellow means heading over; red means it will blow the budget.
Step 5: Will this job make money?
Step 6: Three ways this ends
Methodology and sources
This tool makes no industry claims, so there is nothing to cite. Every number on this page is either yours (revenue, budget, logged costs, percent complete) or part of the example job loaded at the start, which is tagged on screen and is a demo, not industry data.
The math: cost to date = the sum of your logged costs. Finish at this rate projects total cost as cost to date divided by percent complete, then profit = revenue minus projected cost. Stop now bills the share of the contract equal to percent complete and subtracts cost to date. Finish at original estimate keeps cost to date and adds the budgeted cost for the remaining percentage. Margin in every column is profit divided by that column's revenue.
The category flags and the gauge use the framework we teach on Behind the Books: a job planned and finishing at 35 to 45% gross margin is healthy, 30 to 35% is fragile, under 30% will not cover overhead for most trades. A planned job should start at 30% or higher; the loss in the example happens during the work, from cost overruns, not from a low bid.
From Behind the Books · The show
Read the score before the game ends.
Joe walks through the daily job-tracking routine on Behind the Books: how to log costs as they happen and know where a job lands while you still have time to do something about it.
Watch on YouTube →Companion toolkit
Track every job this way, not just this one.
This tracker scores one job live. The free Live Job Profitability Toolkit gives you the Excel workbook to run the same three-ways-it-ends math on every job, plus the daily routine that keeps the numbers honest.
- ■ Live Job Profitability Tracker (Excel) — budget vs. actual, percent complete, and the three projections per job
- ■ Daily Job Tracking Routine (PDF) — the field habit that keeps logged costs current