How to tell which jobs actually made you money

We hear a version of this story every week. There is always less in the account than the billing says there should be, and the owner cannot point at which jobs did it. Ask which ones actually made money and the honest answer comes back: I couldn't tell you. The quotes come from what dad charged, plus gas.

That is not sloppiness. It is a missing instrument. Money in lives in your customer invoices. Money out lives on a paper receipt from the supply house counter. Nothing on your desk puts those two on the same line.

QuickBooks does not close the gap. It holds what you charged. It does not hold what the supply house charged you. The honest number is revenue per labor hour by job type, costed at your real supplier prices, and QuickBooks does not hold that either.

The turn is smaller than people expect. Two forwarding rules go on your email during a 15-minute setup call. Customer invoices go to jobs@. Supply-house invoices go to costs@. If the counter still hands you paper, snap a photo and send it to the same address. That is the whole change to how you work.

Then we spend 30 minutes on your price book and your real supplier prices, so materials are costed at your numbers from day one.

After that, the machine works while the trucks are parked, reading every invoice that landed, matching parts to jobs, and pricing the materials against what you actually paid.

Monday at 6:30am, one email arrives. It ranks your top and bottom jobs by dollars per hour. It lists the flat rates running underwater, what each one costs you, and the number to raise it to. It watches parts-price creep across your top 20 supplies and prints the monthly dollar impact. Every creep claim links to the two invoice images behind it, so the receipt is one tap away. Once a quarter it adds callback counts by tech, counts only.

No login. No dashboard. On Fridays you can reply '4h' to one short email if you want the dollars-per-hour math, or ignore it, and nothing breaks. You never type anything into anything.

The price is printed on the page. $1,997 to set it up, $499/mo to run it. Both sides of the ledger for under $500 a month. If you are not ready to forward customer invoices yet, there is a cost-side-only version at $299/mo.

Year one, all in, is $1,997 plus 12 months at $499. That is $7,985. We are not hiding the setup fee in a footnote.

Now the recovery. Say you billed $84,000 last month. A 1% pricing correction, which just means finding the lines that run light and moving them, is $840 a month. A price fix carries no added cost, so it is gross recovery, roughly $9,200 over 11 months against $7,985 for the year.

That is what a light line looks like. A water-heater flat rate running $62 underwater and sold 11 times last quarter is $682 gone, from one line, in one quarter.

At $840 a month, covering the full $7,985 year takes about 10 months of corrections. Not 2.

And that assumes $84,000. Bill less and the 1% correction shrinks while the $499 a month does not. Below some line it stops paying for itself, and if that is you, wait, or take the cost-side version. We would rather write that down now than find it out together in March.

Saying no is cheaper than a bad fit, so here are the disqualifiers.

If you will not forward customer invoices, half the machine does not exist. Dollars per hour needs both sides. Take the $299/mo cost-side version, or take nothing.

If you want a one-time look at your prices, this is the wrong purchase. Mispricings grow back. Copper and refrigerant move every season, and job mix and labor rates drift every quarter. This is built to work like a smoke detector, not a one-time checkup.

If you want a dashboard, we do not build them. The whole product is one email you can read in the truck.

If you want the callback report as ammunition, it will disappoint you. It states counts by tech for the quarter, with no accusations and no write-ups. You finally see the pattern you have been suspecting, and what you do with it is your call.

And if you cannot give us 15 minutes on a call and 30 minutes on your price book, nothing here works.

Two forwarding rules. 15 minutes on a call, 30 minutes on your price book. Your first scoreboard lands within two weeks, at 6:30 on a Monday morning, in English or Spanish.

We run every machine we sell on our own businesses first. You own the email accounts and the logins the whole time.

Then Monday stops being a guess.