CONTRACTOR GLOSSARY · MATERIALS & PURCHASING
What is Job costing?
Job costing is tracking every dollar of labor and material against the specific job that consumed it — so you know what each job made, not just what the company made.
A company P&L can look healthy while half the jobs inside it lose money and the other half carry them. Job costing breaks the blur: every hour of labor and every stick of material gets assigned to the job that consumed it, so each job shows its own actual cost against its own price — and you learn which work is worth chasing.
For a trade sub, labor is the easy half — timecards already say who worked where. Materials are where job costing lives or dies, because material cost arrives as a stream of counter tickets, delivery tickets, and invoices across every active job at once. The whole system hinges on the cheapest step: the job tag at the supply-house counter. Purchases that land untagged get allocated from memory, or worse, not at all.
The payoff compounds: real per-job actuals are what make the next estimate honest. A sub bidding off gut feel is bidding off the jobs they remember, which are rarely the ones that quietly bled.
Common questions
Why is material the hard part of job costing?
Because material costs arrive continuously and from outside — dozens of supply-house tickets and invoices a month across multiple jobs. Unless each purchase is tagged to a job when it happens, allocation becomes reconstruction.
How does a small sub start job costing?
Two habits cover most of it: put every supply-house purchase on a job account so the paper self-identifies, and code timecard hours by job. Compare actuals to the estimate while the job is running, not after.
RevnuPros tracks the thing, not just the word
Permits to sign-off, T&M tags to signature, materials to billed through, retainage to released — built for subcontractors. Browse the full contractor glossary or the Massachusetts permit guide.
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