You Find Out If a Job Made Money Three Weeks Too Late

You quoted the job at a healthy margin. You think it went fine. But you will not actually know whether it made money until the last timesheet is in and the final supplier bill lands — three weeks after the job finished, and long after you have priced the next three jobs exactly the same way.

Profit you find out about too late

The most expensive number in a trade business is the one you learn after the fact. A job runs a day over. The materials came in dearer than the quote assumed. A subbie's invoice is higher than expected. None of it is dramatic on its own, and none of it is visible while the job is live — it only assembles into a picture weeks later, when the paperwork catches up.

By then the damage is done twice. Once on the job itself, and again on every similar job you have already sent out at the same price, because you never learned the estimate was optimistic.

Costing after the fact tells you what happened. Costing as it happens lets you do something about it.

Start from the estimate you already made

Good job costing does not start with a blank ledger. In Field Forge, when an accepted quote converts to a job, its costed lines carry across as the estimate. That is your baseline — set from the numbers you actually quoted, not a figure typed in afterwards.

From that point, the job has a target to be measured against, and every actual cost that lands is compared to it automatically.

Let the actuals accumulate on their own

Actual costs should build up from the work, not from someone reconstructing them at month end.

• Labour comes from time tracking. Engineers clock in and out against the job from their phones; those hours are valued at each person's hourly cost and flow into the job's actual labour cost.
• Materials and expenses are logged against the job as they are used, including receipts captured in the field.
• Bought-in costs from approved supplier invoices, matched to purchase orders, bridge onto the job's actuals where that is enabled.

The result is a cost picture that updates through the job rather than snapping into focus weeks after it ends.

See the margin while it still matters

Because the actuals accumulate live, a running summary can show estimated versus actual cost — and the margin that falls out of it — while the job is still open.

That is the whole point. An overrun that shows up on day three is a conversation you can still have: a variation to raise, a scope to tighten, a supplier to query. The same overrun discovered at invoicing is just a smaller cheque. Live costing moves the information back to when you can act on it.

And it feeds forward. When you can compare what a job actually cost against what you quoted, the next estimate gets sharper instead of repeating the last one's blind spots.

The figures are calculated, not guessed

One thing worth being clear about: Field Forge uses AI to help build quotes and read documents, but it never sets a cost. Every cost, total, and margin on a job is calculated deterministically by the system from your own rates and your logged data — so you can always trace exactly where a figure came from.

See it on your own jobs

Field Forge is the all-in-one platform for UK trade and field service businesses. Start a free 30-day trial at fieldforge.io, turn a quote into a job, log some time and materials against it, and watch the margin move in real time.