A target for every kind of work
Tell the product the margin you expect — for the business, and for any kind of work — and the report, every job, and the at-risk alerts measure against it, including the jobs nobody quoted.
Margin by job type told you what each kind of work made. It could not tell you whether that was good, because nobody had told it what good is.
One number, and one per kind of work if you want it. Your target margin — the one your proposal costing has always colored line items by — now sits on the Margin Intelligence settings beside the alert thresholds, and any job type can carry its own: forty percent on water heaters, twenty on the maintenance work you take to keep the calendar full. Each type’s card says which it uses — Target 40%, or Target: inherits 35%.
Every page reads against it. The Margin by Job Type report gains a Target column and a Variance column — actual margin less the target, in points, green or red — with a dashed tick on each bar where the target sits and the whole period measured against the business’s number on the totals line. Sort by variance and the kind of work furthest under where you need it is at the top. A job’s financials say it in one line: Type target 35.0% · this job 32.0% (−3.0). The CSV carries both columns.
The alert for the job nobody quoted. Until now, the at-risk alerts measured a job’s drift from the margin it was quoted at — which meant a job with no quote, a service call booked online or taken by phone, could never raise one however badly it went. Now a job with no quote and money received is measured against its type’s target instead, under exactly the same warning and critical thresholds and the same minimum dollar impact, and the alert says vs. target so you know it is not drift from an estimate. A quoted job still measures against its quote; the estimate wins where there is one.
Nothing is recalculated: the margin is the one every job page already shows, the target is a setting, and the variance is one subtraction. On every plan.