Which kinds of work make money
One report grouping every job by its kind of work, so you can see what water heaters make and what the gutter work costs you.
The product knows every job’s margin and every job’s kind of work. This is the report that adds them up — and the sentence it produces is usually the most useful one an owner reads all year:
Water heaters run 41%, drain cleaning runs 18%, and the gutter work I keep saying yes to loses money.
Read the report
Reports → Margin by job type, for a period. One row per kind of work with:
- How many jobs of that kind.
- Revenue.
- Cost, broken into labor, expenses and equipment. Materials are counted in expenses, whether you bought them for the job or took them from your stock.
- The margin in dollars and as a percentage.
The breakdown matters as much as the total. Two kinds of work at the same margin, one heavy on labor and one heavy on materials, are completely different businesses to run.
Act on it
The point of the report is that it changes what you say yes to. A kind of work that consistently loses money is either mispriced, mis-scoped, or not worth doing — and you cannot tell which without the cost breakdown beside it.
Make sure it can tell you anything
This report is only as good as your job types. Everything filed under one catch-all type is a single row that says nothing.
It is worth spending ten minutes under Organization → Job types making the list match your trade rather than living with the single General work type a new business starts with. See Jobs.
Know whether a number is good
A margin figure on its own does not tell you whether to be pleased. Setting a target for the business and per kind of work is Target margins — that is what turns 41% into ahead or behind.
Ask this report a question instead of opening it
On Professional you can ask for what is on this report without finding it and setting a date range: What did I make last quarter?, or What moved last quarter? — which compares against the quarter before and names the kinds of work that account for the difference. Same figures, same report, asked in a sentence. See Ask about your own business.
For a cut this report does not offer — one kind of work by month, or margin by client — build the report yourself from the same figures, by hand on any plan or by describing it on Professional: see Reports you build yourself.
This page describes Margin by Job Type. It is written from that feature’s record and covers what has shipped, never what is planned.