Job Costing 101: How Maine Contractors Can Track Profit on Every Project
Here's a question most Maine contractors can't answer with confidence: which of your jobs last year was actually the most profitable?
Not the biggest. Not the busiest. The most profitable — meaning the one where the gap between what you charged and what it cost you was widest.
If you don't know the answer, you're not alone. Most contractors price jobs based on experience and gut feel, stay busy all season, and hope the numbers work out. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. And without job costing, there's no reliable way to tell the difference — or to get better at estimating over time.
Job costing fixes that. Here's what it is, why it matters for Maine contractors, and how to set it up without making your life complicated.
What job costing actually is
Job costing is the practice of tracking every dollar of income and expense against a specific project — so when the job is done, you can see exactly what it cost and exactly what it earned.
That sounds simple, and the concept is. The challenge for most contractors is that expenses for multiple jobs get lumped together in the same bank account or credit card, materials are purchased without being tagged to a project, and labor costs are tracked loosely if at all.
The result is a set of books that tells you how your business is doing overall but can't tell you how any individual job performed. That's useful information — but it's incomplete.
Why it matters more in Maine than you might think
Maine contractors face real seasonal and geographic pressures that make job costing especially valuable.
Your work season is compressed. In Maine, the window for outdoor construction, landscaping, and many trades is shorter than in warmer states — which means you need to maximize profitability on every job you take, not just stay busy.
Your jobs vary widely. A Maine general contractor might run a bathroom renovation, a deck build, and a foundation repair in the same month. These jobs have very different cost structures and very different profit profiles. Treating them all the same financially means you can't learn from the differences.
Material and labor costs fluctuate. Lumber prices, fuel costs, and subcontractor rates in Maine have been volatile in recent years. Job costing lets you see in real time when a job is trending over budget — before it's too late to adjust.
The four numbers every job needs
For basic job costing, every project needs four numbers tracked against it:
Estimated Revenue — what you bid the job for Actual Revenue — what you invoiced and collected Estimated Costs — what you projected the job would cost in materials, labor, and subcontractors Actual Costs — what the job actually cost
The gap between estimated and actual — on both the revenue and cost side — is where the learning happens. A job that came in under budget on materials tells you your estimating is solid there. A job that ran significantly over on labor tells you something about how you're pricing that type of work.
Over a full season of tracking these numbers, patterns emerge. You'll start to see which types of jobs you consistently underbid, which clients tend to generate scope creep, and where your most reliable margins actually come from.
How to set this up in QuickBooks Online
QuickBooks Online Plus makes job costing straightforward through its Projects feature. Here's the basic setup:
Turn on Projects in your QuickBooks settings. Create a new project for each job when it's awarded — not when it starts, so you can capture any pre-job expenses like permits or deposits. Assign every expense to its project when you enter it — materials, subcontractor invoices, any direct costs. When you create an invoice, link it to the project.
That's the core of it. QuickBooks will do the math and generate a Project Profitability report that shows you revenue, costs, and margin for every job in your system.
A few habits that make job costing work
The system is only as good as the data going in. A few habits make a big difference:
Take a photo of every materials receipt and attach it to the transaction in QuickBooks immediately — don't let receipts pile up
Assign expenses to projects at the time of entry, not in a batch at the end of the month
Review your Project Profitability report at the end of every job, not just at year end
When a job goes over budget, note why — that context makes the data actionable
What you'll find when you start looking
Most Maine contractors who start job costing are surprised by what they find. Usually there are one or two job types that are consistently more profitable than everything else — and one or two that quietly drain margin every time. That information is worth far more than the time it takes to set up the system.
Busy is not the same as profitable. Job costing is what tells you the difference.
McAfee's Bookkeeping helps Maine contractors set up job costing in QuickBooks Online so every project's profitability is visible and every season's numbers make sense. Schedule a free consultation here.
