Job Costing & Margin Checker: Catch the Money-Losing Quote Before It Goes Out

The problem this kills

Your estimator quotes a job. It looks fine on the page — labor hours, a list of parts, a price the customer will accept. It goes out the door. Three weeks later the job closes and you find out it barely broke even, or worse, you paid for the privilege of doing it. The wage looked covered, but nobody added in payroll taxes, benefits, drive time, or the cost of the truck that carried the tech. Parts went out at cost instead of with your markup. Overhead never entered the math at all.

Job costing usually lives in someone's head or in a spreadsheet that only the owner understands. Estimators eyeball a price and hope. There's no consistent check that a quote actually clears your target margin before it's sent, and no record of who approved a thin one. The result is a pile of "won" jobs that quietly drained your cash, and a margin that's a mystery until the books close. You don't need an ERP and you don't need to be a developer to fix this.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool that does the cost build-up for you. An estimator enters or imports a quote: the labor lines (hours by role), the parts lines, and the quoted price. The tool applies your numbers — the loaded labor cost (wage plus taxes, benefits, and drive/overhead time, not just the hourly wage), your parts markup, and your truck and overhead allocation — to compute the true cost of the job. It then calculates the margin percentage against the quoted price and compares it to your target margin for that job type (a service call, a tenant-improvement install, and a maintenance contract can each have their own target). Any quote that comes in below target is flagged. A manager reviews the flagged quotes and either approves the thin margin (sometimes you take a strategic job on purpose) or sends it back to be repriced. Only approved quotes get marked released, and the whole margin report exports as a clean CSV.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how you price today, what your real loaded labor rates are by role, how you mark up parts, how you allocate truck and overhead, your target margins by job type, the exact columns in your quotes, and the messy edge cases (subcontracted work, customer-supplied materials, flat-rate vs. time-and-materials, multi-day jobs) — and then it tailors the cost model, the margin math, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template; the agent reads a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. From there it walks the agent through the quote intake, the cost build-up engine, the margin flagging, the manager review-and-approve screen, the release step, and the CSV margin report — each step with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can build the whole thing today even with no integration to your estimating software.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This tool decides whether a quote loses you money, so it ships with the controls a real service business needs: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own company's quotes and rates, a complete audit trail of who entered, costed, flagged, approved, repriced, and released each quote and when, a hard human-approval gate so no below-target quote is released until a manager signs off on the margin, and duplicate guards keyed on your quote number so the same quote can't be costed and released twice.

Who it's for

Estimators, service managers, and owner-operators at HVAC, plumbing, electrical, restoration, landscaping, and general field-service shops — anyone who sends quotes and wants to stop discovering after the fact that a job lost money. If you can tell us your loaded labor rate, your parts markup, and the margin you need to hit, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, answer the interview, and you'll watch your first margin-checked quote get flagged and approved the same afternoon.