Guides · Job costing

The job costing question most shops can't answer

Knowing the bank balance is not knowing which jobs paid for themselves. The gap between those two questions is where a fifth of annual profit goes.

Updated 2026-09-20 · every figure below is listed with its source at the end of the page

Ask an owner whether the shop is profitable and they will pull up the bank balance. Ask which jobs from last month made money and which lost it, and the conversation stops.

That gap is job costing. It is not a bookkeeping nuance — it is the difference between reacting to a number three months late and knowing, job by job, where the money went.

Why it stays invisible

Pricing tends to run off one number: the technician’s hourly wage. The real cost of a job also carries payroll taxes, workers’ comp, benefits, the truck, overhead, and the paid hours that never reach an invoice — the seven components of a loaded hour.

When only the wage is tracked, every job looks profitable at the invoice level, because the invoice was priced against a number that was already too low. The shop is not lying to itself. It is measuring against the wrong baseline, consistently, on every job.

Owning the software is not the same as using it

83% vs 31%

field-service software adoption at ten or more vehicles, against fewer than five S-ACCA-04

And where the software does exist, 56% of contractors use it mainly for invoicing rather than the cost tracking it is also capable of S-ACCA-01. Installing the tool does not mean anyone is reading the number.

This is also why shop size predicts profit: 5% net at four trucks or fewer, 8% at ten or more, against a 6% trade average S-ACCA-03.

What it costs

Jobs priced below true cost — roughly a fifth of jobs at a typical shop — erase a fifth of annual profit S-ACCA-03. On a business running at a 6% net margin, losing a fifth of it to jobs nobody flagged is the difference between a normal year and a year the owner cannot explain.

What to do this week, without buying anything

Pull last month’s invoices. For five of them — a mix of service calls and installs — run the fully loaded cost, not the wage, against what was actually charged.

If two or three come back below cost, that is not coincidence; it is the pattern the survey describes. If none do, you are ahead of most of the trade, and the thing worth confirming is whether that holds on every job rather than on the five you happened to pick.

Check it with your own numbers

The calculator asks for your wage, your overhead and your billable hours, and returns the rate that covers them. It runs in your browser: nothing you type is sent anywhere, and no account is needed to see the result.

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The calculator is the free part of Operadox. What Operadox is

What this page does not cover

The adoption figures come from a survey of association members and respondents, who are likely to be more structured than the trade as a whole.
Nothing here measures how accurate the cost data inside those systems is — only whether cost per job is tracked at all.

Sources

Every figure on this page, with where it comes from and how firmly it stands.
Ref	What it covers	Type	Standing	Read
S-ACCA-03	Share of annual profit removed by under-priced jobs; average net profit and its split by shop size	Industry association	estimated — range varies by source	2026-09-16
S-ACCA-04	Field-service software adoption by fleet size — 83% at ten or more vehicles, 31% under five	Trade press reporting an association survey	estimated — range varies by source	2026-09-20
S-ACCA-01	Share of contractors who own field-service software but use it mainly for invoicing	Industry association survey, 1000+ contractors	estimated — range varies by source	2026-09-16

“Estimated” means the published range differs between sources and we carry the range rather than picking a point inside it. Figures read directly at an official source are marked as such. This page is a methodology explainer, not accounting advice.