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Your P&L tells you if the company made money. Only job costing tells you which jobs made money and which ones quietly lost it.

A resource from RocketLevel for restoration company owners, estimators, and finance, backed by decades of experience in the trade. About a 5 minute read.

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Make your own copy. Open the Job Costing Worksheet and save your own copy. Fill in the green cells and everything else calculates. It is yours to keep and edit. Its results are estimates built only from what you enter, so check them with your own accountant.

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A restoration company can be profitable overall and still be losing money on a chunk of its jobs, with the winners covering for the losers. You will never see it on the profit and loss statement (P&L), because the P&L blends everything together. The only way to know whether a given job actually made money, and why, is job costing: tracking the real cost of each job against what it brought in. Once you job-cost, the losing jobs show up, and so does the pricing that produced them.

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Why the P&L hides losing jobs

The profit and loss statement is a company-wide average. It tells you the business netted a certain percent, but it cannot tell you that your big reconstruction jobs are strong while your small mitigation jobs lose money on every truck roll, or that one client's work is never actually profitable after the rework and the slow pay.

What goes into a real job cost

A real job cost captures everything the job actually consumed:

Direct labor at its burdened cost, not just wages but also the taxes, insurance, and time that hour truly costs.

Equipment, at a real daily rate, for the days it was actually on the job.

Materials and consumables, with receipts.

Subcontractors and any other direct costs.

An allocation of overhead, so the job carries its share of the cost of keeping the doors open. Allocate that overhead on a labor basis (labor hours or labor dollars), not as a flat percent of revenue. A flat percent of revenue over-burdens fast, high-dollar mitigation jobs and under-burdens long reconstruction jobs that tie up your people for weeks, which distorts which jobs look profitable.

Compare that fully-loaded cost to what the job billed and collected, and you have the truth about whether it made money. Cost every job on two lines, not one. The first is gross: revenue minus direct cost, before any overhead. That is the number you compare against a division benchmark, because published gross margin ranges are calculated before overhead. The second is net job contribution: gross profit minus the job's share of overhead. That is the number that tells you whether the job paid for its own share of keeping the doors open. Owners who report one blended number end up arguing with a benchmark that was never measuring the same thing.

A worked example

A six-day water mitigation job, costed all the way through.