Job costing for coating contractors

Your P&L cannot tell you what you need

A profit and loss statement is a company level summary, written after the fact. It tells you March was thin. It does not tell you which floors made March thin, and that difference is the whole thing.

By the time a bad month shows up on a P&L, you already quoted the next thirty floors using the same assumptions that produced it. The error is not in your bookkeeping. It is in your estimating, and a P&L cannot see estimating at all.

Job costing closes that loop. Cost each floor as it finishes. Compare it with what you estimated. A pattern shows up after about ten jobs instead of after a year. That is the difference between a pricing system and a pricing habit.

The five things to track

Keep it to five. Shops that try to track twenty fields stop in three weeks.

1. Square feet actually coated. Measured, not quoted. Those two differ more often than you would think.
2. Material used, by product. What left the truck and went on the floor, including waste and partial kits.
3. Crew hours, by person. Real hours on the job. Setup, travel if you cost it, and cleanup.
4. Job specific costs. Rental, dump fees, permits, the second trip, fuel if you allocate it.
5. Invoiced amount. The quote plus approved change orders. The invoice, not the hopeful number.

Those five give you everything that matters. Direct cost, margin after overhead, cost per square foot, and your real daily rate. Anything else is refinement, and almost every coating shop is not yet doing these five.

Running the numbers on a finished floor

That is the whole exercise. Notice what it produced. Not "the job made money", which you already suspected. It gave you the specific reason it missed target. Two crew hours.

Do that on ten floors and the pattern stops being a story. If eight of them ran long on prep heavy slabs, you just found a pricing error you can fix this week.

Material is where the leak usually is

Labor overruns are visible. Somebody was there late. Material disappears quietly, and it is your second biggest cost.

Four ways it goes, all invisible without job level tracking.

• Waste. Mixed too much, mixed wrong, pot life ran out. Real and normal. The question is how much is normal for you.
• Over ordering. Material bought for a job, used partly, left in a corner, forgotten, bought again.
• Shelf life. Opened kits that go off. Cash written off with no journal entry anywhere.
• Walking off. Material that leaves a site in somebody’s truck. Uncomfortable, and it happens.

None of it shows up on a P&L in a usable form. The P&L shows total material spend for the month, and that number always looks roughly plausible. You find the leak by comparing material used per job against material estimated per job, which is exactly what inventory tracking tied to jobs does.

The byproduct worth more than the costing

Here is the part people do not expect. The most valuable output of job costing is not the margin figure. It is your daily rate.

After ten costed floors you know, with evidence, how many square feet your crew finishes in a day. On clean concrete. On normal slabs. On rough ones. That number feeds every quote you will ever write. Until you have measured it, you are guessing in the exact spot where your biggest cost lives.

It also makes your estimates self correcting. Each costed job updates the rate. The updated rate prices the next job better. That loop is the difference between a shop that prices well in year three and one still arguing with itself about whether the market got competitive. The price calculator takes daily rate as a direct input for that reason, and the guide on daily crew production covers how to set and hold it.

How to do it without it dying in week three

Every coating owner has started a job costing spreadsheet. Most of those spreadsheets have three jobs in them.

The reason is always the same. It needs somebody to retype numbers in the evening, and the evening is when you are quoting tomorrow’s work or asleep. The information already exists. It is on a delivery ticket, a timesheet, a text message and an invoice. The whole cost of job costing is the cost of pulling it together by hand.

So make the capture happen where the work happens.

• Material logged on the job, by the crew, on a phone. Not reconciled against a supplier statement three weeks later.
• Hours captured against the job, not against the week.
• Overhead applied automatically, as a percentage you set once.
• Margin visible on the job, not in a monthly export.

That is the core of what job costing and inventory software does for a coating shop. It is also the highest value system a growing shop can put in, well ahead of anything to do with scheduling. A calendar tells you where the crew is. Job costing tells you whether sending them there was worth it.

Common questions

Keep reading