How to know if an electrical job actually made money

Most small contractors can tell you if a job "went okay." Fewer can prove it with numbers. That gap is expensive. You bid the next job based on memory, you steal from a good job to cover a bad one, and you never really know which customer or crew pattern is eating your margin.

This isn't about accounting software or MBA-level finance. It's about three simple buckets on every job — labor, materials, and what's left — captured while the work is happening, not months later.

It takes discipline and a system. Paper time cards drift. Material receipts end up in the truck cupholder. Taxes, benefits, and tool costs rarely get counted consistently. So owners go by gut feeling — or by what's in the bank account.

The price of that shortcut: jobs that felt fine but lost money, change orders you did for free, and crew overtime you never tied back to what you bid.

It's not laziness. It's capacity. When you're bidding, managing guys, and putting out fires, nobody's building a second set of books. The trick is to capture enough while the job runs that closing it out is easy — not a detective project.

On every job, you want three things:

• Labor cost — real hours at your full cost per hour (not just base pay).
• Material cost — what you actually spent, including last-minute supply house runs.
• Gross margin — revenue minus those two, before overhead.

If you can only track one, track labor. Project work is labor-heavy, and hour slippage is the most common way a job quietly bleeds out.

Your real cost per hour isn't what you pay the guy. It includes payroll taxes, workers' comp, health insurance if you offer it, PTO, tool allowances, and a share of non-billable time — shop, drive, training. A rough rule for most small contractor shops: 1.35× to 1.6× base wage is your actual cost. Your accountant can sharpen that number from last year's books.

Multiply cost per hour × verified hours on the job. Verified means from digital time entries, daily logs, or your lead guy's sign-off — not "about eight hours" written on Friday. Rounding errors add up across a crew all week.

Break hours down by phase if you estimated that way — by the milestones your contract is structured around. "Rough ran long" teaches you something different than "everything drifted evenly."

Receipt photos, job-coded purchase orders, or a running material list beat memory every time. The killer is the small trips: fittings, fasteners, supplies you grabbed because the scope changed mid-job. They seem cheap per run. They're not cheap per job.

Pick one habit the crew can actually keep: photo every supplier ticket to a job folder, or put one person in charge of logging material pulls daily. Consistency beats perfection. Missing 10 percent of receipts still beats missing 40 percent.

If you buy on a house account, reconcile it to the job weekly — not at month-end when nobody remembers which address got the late change order. Ask your supplier to put the job name on invoices. That one line saves hours.

Gross margin on well-run residential and light commercial project work typically lands around 35–55 percent. If you're regularly under 30 percent, something is off — your estimate, your execution, or your scope control.

Track estimated margin at bid vs actual margin at close. A five-point miss on ten jobs is usually an estimating or field execution pattern. A twenty-point miss on one job is usually a scope problem — or worse. You can't tell which without the numbers.

When you close a job, take two minutes:

• Compare estimated hours vs actual — by phase if you estimated that way.
• Compare estimated materials vs actual — even a rough bucket helps.
• Write one line: what you'd bid differently next time.

That's your institutional memory. Two minutes per job beats a two-hour spreadsheet postmortem you never actually schedule.

If you want this visibility without building a second system, Fieldwright ties daily field data and costs back to the job automatically — so you're not reconstructing the story a month later.