How Do I Know If My Jobs Are Actually Profitable?

You finish the job, send the invoice, get paid, move on to the next one. Do you know what that job made you?

Most tradespeople know what they charged. They know when the money landed. They know they are busy.

But being busy is not the same as being profitable.

Getting paid is not the same as making money

You quote a job at £3,000. On the day you send it, that looks like a good week's work.

Then the job runs:

• materials come to £1,100, not the £800 you allowed
• extra parts, another £150
• delays add four days
• three more runs to the merchant

The customer still pays £3,000. You keep far less than you counted on.

What counts as a cost

The cost of a job is everything you spent to get it done.

Materials. Parts, supplies, delivery.

Your own time. This is the one people leave out. Your hours cost the business money even though nobody sends you an invoice for them. So put a price on them. Decide what a day of your work is worth — say £250 — and charge the job for every day you spend on it, exactly as you would if you were paying someone else to be there.

Where that day rate comes from is in How Much Profit Should I Make as a Tradesperson?

Everything else. Fuel, parking, merchant runs, subbies, hired plant, the repair nobody saw coming. Each one is small. That is why they get left out, and why the total surprises you.

Work out the profit on one job

Profit is one sum:

Price of the job − total cost of the job = profit

The price is on your invoice. The cost is the list above, added up.

Do that sum twice on the £3,000 job. Once with the numbers you quoted. Once with the numbers that happened.

Your time is already paid for inside that £1,800, so the £1,200 is profit and nothing else.

The cost went up by £1,540. The profit went down by the same £1,540. A profit of £1,200 became a loss of £340.

The customer still pays £3,000. Nobody covers that extra £1,540 but you.

That is the whole of it. Every pound a job costs more than you allowed is a pound off your profit.

The invoice was paid in full, and the job still cost you £340 to do.

You do not need software for this. You need the price, the receipts, and an honest count of the days.

Do it on three finished jobs this week and you will know more about your business than the diary has told you all year.

Four signs a job is not paying

The diary is full and the account is not

A full diary feels like success. If the bank does not agree, something in the middle is wrong: the prices, the costs, or the kind of work you keep taking on.

More on why a full diary and an empty account go together: Why Being Busy Doesn't Always Mean You're Making Money.

Jobs run past the time you allowed

A quick job that turns into three extra days was never a quick job. It was priced as one.

You cannot say which jobs are losing you money

The jobs you enjoy are not always the jobs that pay. Until you check, the job that lost you money looks like all the rest.

You are going on memory

You move straight from one job to the next. Six months later you cannot remember where that one went wrong, or whether it was worth doing at all.

The job knew. You just did not write it down.

What a finished job can tell you

Set what you expected against what happened and the job answers real questions.

Was the quote close? Did the materials come in where you thought? Did the hours? Is this the third bathroom in a row that ran over?

One job is a story. Ten jobs are a pattern, and a pattern is something you can price against.

How Nule helps

You can do that sum by hand. Doing it for every job, every week, for a year, is where it falls down. Which is why most tradespeople stop after the third one.

Nule was built on one idea: you should know where your money is made and where it goes.

Instead of piecing it together from a spreadsheet, a banking app and a separate invoicing tool, Nule keeps the quote, the job, the costs and the invoice in one place, and your accountant can see it too.

Price the work with materials, outside costs and a buffer. The customer accepts and the quote becomes a live job on its own, so the estimate is still there to measure against when you finish.

When the job is done, set them side by side: what you quoted, what the materials cost, how long it took, and the profit left at the end.

End Job Insights show how that one job went. Business Insights show what keeps happening:

• which jobs lose you money
• where the same kind of work gets priced too low, again and again
• materials against your estimates
• hours against the time you allowed
• where your expenses actually go

Experience is worth more with figures behind it

Good tradespeople learn from the work. Every quote, job and invoice tells you something about how to price the next one.

Know your numbers and you can quote with your head up, hold your profit, and turn down the work that was never worth having.

The aim is not to finish more jobs.

The aim is for every job to be worth finishing.