Job Costing for Denver Trades
Which jobs, routes and crews actually made money? We set up real job costing in QuickBooks Online for Denver cleaning, painting and flooring businesses — labor, materials and subs coded to the work that caused them, reported against your estimates while the job is still running.
Why totals lie
A P&L with one line for labor and one for materials can look healthy while a third of your jobs quietly lose money — the winners subsidize the losers and the totals hide the transfer. Job costing ends the cross-subsidy: every job, route and crew carries its own revenue, its own costs, and its own verdict.
What setup includes
- Chart of accounts restructured for your trade — direct costs separated from overhead
- Projects/classes structured to match how you estimate and sell
- Labor mapped with burden — real crew cost, not just wages
- Field-software integration (Jobber, Housecall Pro, PaintScout, DripJobs, RFMS/QFloors)
- Saved job-profitability reports — margin per job is one click, not a spreadsheet night
- Training for whoever enters bills, so costs land on the right job the first time
Per trade
Cleaning: route and crew profitability, labor % per contract. Painting: estimated vs. actual hours and dollars per job, per crew. Flooring: true margin per install with landed material cost and installer pay included. The industry pages show each in depth: cleaning · painting · flooring.
FAQ
Job costing — common questions
What is job costing, in plain English?
Tracking what each job actually cost you — labor, materials, subs, equipment — against what you charged, so every job gets a real profit number. It's the difference between knowing the company made money and knowing which work made it.
Do you use QuickBooks projects or classes?
Both, depending on the trade: projects for discrete jobs (painting, flooring installs), classes for ongoing lines of business (cleaning routes, service vs. install). We pick the structure that matches how you estimate and sell.
Is job costing included or extra?
It's included from the Foreman package ($600/month) up, and basic setup is part of every onboarding. As a standalone project — setup plus training for your team — it's quoted fixed after a free scope call.
We already run Jobber / PaintScout / RFMS. Doesn't that do this?
Field software estimates and schedules; it doesn't keep your accounting truthful. We map its data into QuickBooks so the job numbers your software shows and the money your bank shows finally agree.
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