You don't know if a job made money until it's too late.

Plenty of electrical contractors finish a job, send the last invoice and still can't say whether it made money. Electrical job costing happens weeks later or not at all, and by then the crew is several jobs down the road.

Book a call

Rows of blank paper time cards with name, date and in and out columns standing in a worn wooden rack — Photo by Cord Allman on Unsplash

Sound familiar?

Someone asks whether the last job made money, and the honest answer is a guess.
You find out a job went over when the bank balance looks thin, not while the crew is still on it.
Hours come in on timesheets, material shows up on supplier invoices, and the two never land in the same place.
The job cost numbers are always behind, and nobody really looks at them until tax time.

What it costs you

A job that's running over is still fixable while the crew is on it. Weeks later, it's just a loss.

You can't see which work actually pays. Service calls, new construction, remodels and panel swaps all keep you busy. Without the numbers, you can't tell which ones carry the shop.

The next bid starts from the same blind spot. If the last job lost money and nobody knew, nothing tells you to look harder at the next one.

And you can work hard all year and still wonder where the money went.

Why it keeps happening

The information is spread out. Hours on paper timesheets or phones, material on supplier invoices and receipts, extras on change orders, and the original estimate somewhere else again.

Matching all of it to the right job is tedious. It lands on whoever runs the office, after everything else that's due.

Material gets bought for one job and used on another. Hours get put on the wrong job, or never written down at all.

By the time the numbers are cleaned up, the job is closed and everyone has moved on.

Who you'll talk to

Kevin Kirchner smiling, in black glasses, a black cap and a green plaid shirt — Kevin Kirchner

This call is with me, Kevin Kirchner, an AI enablement specialist at True Frontier. I'll ask where your hours, material and invoices live today, and when, if ever, they end up side by side for one job.

The tedious matching behind job costing doesn't have to grind your office down every week anymore. How depends on what your shop tracks today, and where.

Questions

What is job costing for an electrical contractor?

It's comparing what a job actually cost you, in labor, material and everything else, with what you billed for it. Done job by job, it shows which work makes money and which doesn't.

Why is job costing always behind?

It depends on paperwork from the field, your suppliers and the office, and all of it shows up late or in the wrong place. Someone has to match it up by hand, and that someone is usually busy.

Can you tell me what to charge?

No. Pricing is your call, and I don't give pricing advice. What we can talk through is where your job numbers come from and why they show up late.

What exactly do you build?

It depends on how you work today; we figure that out on the call.