Construction job costing, explained plainly

Construction job costing is the practice of tracking a job's expected cost against its actual cost as the job runs, so you know its profit and margin before the final invoice — not months later when you're doing year-end books.

Why job-level tracking beats company-level totals

A company can look profitable overall while several jobs quietly lose money. Job-level costing surfaces which specific jobs are performing and which are running over, so you can adjust bidding or execution on future work of the same type.

The three numbers that matter on every job

• Expected cost — your budget or bid at the start of the job.
• Actual cost — the real total of expenses, materials, labor and subcontractor cost logged so far.
• Projected final cost — actual cost plus committed but unpaid cost, forecasting where the job will land. While a job is open, it never drops below your original expected cost, so an early job with little logged yet doesn't look artificially cheap.

MarginGuard tracks all three per job, along with resulting profit and margin, so you always know where a job stands.