Tracking job costs and profit margins
See exactly what each job costs you in labour, materials and subcontractors — and know your true profit margin on every piece of work.
How to track job costs
- 1Open any job and click the “Costs” tab to view a breakdown of labour, materials and subcontractor costs.
- 2Add labour cost by entering your engineer's hourly cost rate (set in Team > each engineer's profile) — Trade2Base calculates this from logged time automatically.
- 3Add material costs by linking parts from your parts catalogue or entering ad-hoc costs.
- 4View the gross profit calculation at the bottom of the Costs tab — revenue minus total costs.
- 5Use the Profit Margin Report in Reports to see profitability across all jobs, filtered by job type, engineer or date range.
Set a cost rate (what you pay your engineer) and a charge rate (what you bill) separately in team settings. Trade2Base uses the cost rate for job costing and the charge rate for invoice generation.
Frequently asked questions
Go to Team > select the engineer > edit their profile. You'll see fields for both their cost rate (per hour) and charge rate. These are kept separate so your team doesn't see profit margin details.
Yes — the Profit Margin Report can be filtered by job type, letting you compare margins on, for example, boiler installations versus service calls.
Van and overhead costs are not automatically included in job costing, but you can add them as ad-hoc cost lines on individual jobs or track them via the expense report separately.
Yes — from the Profit Margin Report, click Export to download a CSV of all job cost data including revenue, costs and margin for every job in your selected date range.