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.

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.

Understand what you are being compared against

Alerts measure against the frozen baseline — what the job was quoted at when the proposal was accepted. That figure never recalculates from anything that has changed since.

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

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.

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, expenses above the estimate, change orders that were never billed: each is a different problem with a different answer, and a warning that does not distinguish them is a warning that gets dismissed.

Keep it out of the way until it matters

Sections are collapsed by default and open themselves only when something has actually drifted. On a job that is going fine, this takes up almost no room.

If your work does not need any of it, there is a master switch in your organization settings that hides the whole suite. A business doing flat-rate service calls does not need labor forecasting, and should not have to look at it.

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.