Guide
Job costing in four numbers
Job costing gets explained in accountants' words and lost on the way to the site. It's four numbers per job, and you can say all four out loud without opening a spreadsheet.
The four
- Contract value. What the job is worth today: the budget lines you priced, plus every change order the client approved. Not what you hoped in March.
- Billed. What you've invoiced the client so far, before tax.
- Not billed yet. Work that's done but hasn't gone on an invoice: the hours logged since the last one, and the supplier bills that landed after it.
- Left to bill. Contract value, less billed, less not billed yet. This is the one that tells you whether there's room left in the job.
Contract value minus billed minus not billed yet equals left to bill. It holds on the whole job, and it holds on every budget line inside it. A line whose left-to-bill has gone negative is a line you've already spent past, whatever the job's total says.
Where a spreadsheet gets it wrong
Not through bad arithmetic. Through timing.
- Hours arrive late. Paper timesheets come in on Friday, get typed up the week after, and the job looks cheaper than it is for ten days at a stretch — usually the ten days you're deciding whether to price the next change generously.
- Bills land after the invoice. The framing invoice goes out on the 15th; the lumber bill for that framing arrives on the 20th. Unless something holds that cost against the job anyway, the line looks fine until the month-end tidy-up.
- Change orders don't reach the budget. The client approves an extra by text. The work happens. The budget still shows the original number, so the line reads over when it isn't — or reads fine when it isn't.
- Two versions of the truth. One spreadsheet on the office computer, one on a laptop, and a copy emailed to the bookkeeper. Whichever one you open is the one you believe.
What good looks like
- The four numbers are current to this morning, because hours land on the job when the crew clocks out and bills land when they're entered.
- Every line carries its own four numbers, so "we're fine overall" can't hide a line that's forty percent over.
- An approved change order moves the contract value the moment it's approved, not at the next invoice.
- Anything that needs you — a line over, a bill overdue, a change order the client has sat on — shows up on one list with the money beside it.
How often to look
Once a week is enough on a job that's running normally, and the best time is before you send the next invoice: that's the moment the four numbers change what you do. Look again before pricing a change, because the room you have on a line is the honest starting point for what the extra should cost.
When left to bill goes negative
It means the work done already exceeds what the job can be billed for. Three honest answers: there's an approved change order that never made it into the contract value; a cost landed on the wrong job; or the job is genuinely over and the next conversation is with the client, not the spreadsheet. Work through them in that order — two of the three are paperwork, and they're the common ones.
How Millo does it
Millo keeps these four numbers on every job and every budget line, worked out from the hours your crew log on their phones, the bills you enter and the invoices you send. It's job-costing software that runs on your own office computer, bought once, with no subscription.