Margin alerts

Finding out a job lost money after it is finished is history. Margin alerts watch a running job against what it was quoted at and tell you while you can still do something — a change order, a conversation, a different crew tomorrow.

See the dollars first

Every alert leads with the dollar impact, with the percentage as context.

That ordering is deliberate. Eight percent sounds survivable until you learn it is $3,400; forty percent sounds catastrophic until you learn it is $190 on a service call. The dollar figure is the one that tells you whether to act.

Avoid being told about nothing

An alert has to cross both a percentage threshold and a dollar minimum before you hear about it — and only a loss counts toward the minimum, so a job that made more dollars than quoted at a thinner percentage raises nothing. The critical threshold sits at or below the warning one; set the other way round, the settings say so and are not saved.

Either one alone produces noise. A percentage on its own fires constantly on small jobs; a dollar figure on its own misses a large job quietly bleeding. Requiring both is what keeps the alerts worth reading — and an alerting system people learn to ignore protects nothing.

A finished job is measured on what it was quoted at until nothing is left to bill on it and its invoices are paid, then on what actually came in — so a job billed as a deposit and a balance is not flagged on the deposit alone while the balance is still owed. Money still owed shows on Getting paid, not as a margin alert.

Understand what you are being compared against

Alerts measure against the frozen baseline — what the job was quoted at when the proposal was accepted. No cost, hour or payment moves it. The one thing that does is a change order: once one is accepted, its lines join the baseline, so the extra work counts with its price as well as its cost, and if it is voided they leave again.

If the baseline moved every time a cost did, the job would always look on target and the whole thing would be pointless.

A job nobody quoted — a service call, an online booking, a phone job — has no baseline. Once money has come in for it, it is measured against the target margin for its kind of work instead, under the same thresholds, and the alert says vs. target so nobody takes it for drift from a quote. A job with a quote is always measured against the quote. See Target margins.

Progress is also explicit rather than inferred. The product does not guess how complete a job is from how much of the money has come in; invoicing early does not make a job look finished. It is done milestones over milestones — on a job with a plan whose tasks carry hours, the share of those hours done — or the figure you typed: the one figure the job’s page shows, Margin Intelligence or not. See Milestones and the payment schedule.

Know what to do about it

An alert always says why it fired and what to do, not just that something is wrong.

Labor running over its estimate, expenses above theirs, equipment over its own: each is a different problem with a different answer, and a warning that does not distinguish them is a warning that gets dismissed. The alert names which one it is, or says Multiple cost drivers when labor and expenses are over by about the same.

On a job with a plan, with Projects on, the alert also says where: Drifting in names the milestone costing the most over its estimate.

Keep it out of the way until it matters

The alert itself appears only once a job has crossed both thresholds: a job that is going fine has no banner and no line on the dashboard. Dismiss puts an alert away at the level it is at: if the job gets worse, or eases from Critical to Warning, the new alert shows; and once the job reads healthy again the dismissal is over, so drifting back tells you again. Expense tracking on the job’s Financials tab holds what was spent against the materials estimated — on the quote, or typed under Job estimates — never the estimate’s labor. Its panels on the job’s Financials tab open with the tab, except Cost breakdown by line item, which stays folded until you open it, and a panel with nothing to measure — no hours estimated, say — is a single line saying so.

If your work does not need any of it, remove Margin Intelligence under Tools — see Your tools. Its alerts and its panels on a job’s Financials tab — where the job is heading, its cost by line item, who worked it, the labor forecast and expenses against the estimate — leave with it; the job’s costing summary stays, because those figures are the job’s. A business doing flat-rate service calls does not need labor forecasting, and should not have to look at it.

Adding or removing it is its only switch: Add or Remove on its card, or at the head of its page. Its settings — the target margin and when a job’s drift is an alert — are under Settings on its page, and can be set before it is added.

What it costs

It is on every plan. Margin alerts are a calculation over data you already hold on our own systems, and the rule in this product is that Starter gets everything that runs there.