Know what you kept: job costing, cost templates, and margin alerts
Labor rate profiles, cost categories and templates for estimating; a baseline frozen when the proposal is accepted; and an alert when a job's margin drifts from it.
Estimating gets a vocabulary. Labor rate profiles hold what an hour costs you and what it bills at, by kind of work rather than by person. Cost categories and cost templates make a familiar job quick to price consistently. Job types describe the work a business does.
When a proposal is accepted, its line items become the job’s baseline — frozen, never recalculated. As hours and expenses are logged, the job’s Financials tab shows actual cost against that baseline and the margin as it stands.
Margin intelligence watches the gap. When a job drifts past both a percentage and a dollar threshold — both, so a small job does not cry wolf — you are told, in dollars first. A labor forecast says where the hours are heading, an expense variance says what is over, and a change order’s impact is shown before it is accepted.