Every fence company owner has a hunch about which work pays. Vinyl in the subdivisions, wood privacy on the older streets, commercial chain-link that's all footage and no gates. The hunch is usually close. Job costing tells you how close, and it only works if four things are true in QuickBooks.
Miss any one of them and the job report fills with zeros, or worse, numbers that look right and aren't.
1. Every job is its own project
The job report can only total what's attached to a job. So each job needs its own place in QuickBooks, either a Project or a sub-customer under the homeowner or contractor.
On QuickBooks Online Plus or Advanced, Projects are built in, and they're the cleaner choice. They show income, costs and what's left on one screen.
How to tell if this is missing: you search for a job from last summer and find only the customer's name, with five years of invoices underneath it.
2. Invoices carry the fence type
For QuickBooks to split revenue by fence type, the invoice has to say what was sold. The simplest way is a product or service item for each type: vinyl, wood, chain-link, aluminum, plus gates and removal if you price them separately.
Classes can do the same job on Plus or Advanced, and some companies use both. What matters is that it's on every invoice, every time, picked from a short list.
How to tell if this is missing: your invoices use one item called Fence Installation, or a free-typed description and nothing else.
3. Bills are tagged to the job
Materials are the biggest cost on most fence jobs, and they arrive on supplier bills and card charges. Each line has to carry the job, and the fence type if the bill covers more than one.
This is where most job costing breaks. The bill gets entered from the supplier statement in one lump at the end of the month, with no job on it, and the materials land in a general account.
How to tell if this is missing: run the job report and look at the cost column. If it's mostly empty, the bills aren't tagged.
4. Crew time is recorded by job
Crew pay is usually the second-biggest cost on a job, and it's the hardest one to attach. Payroll runs once a week or once every two weeks, in one total, and it doesn't know which yard a crew was in on Tuesday.
So the hours have to be recorded by job wherever your crews clock in, whether that's QuickBooks Time or another app. Then the pay can follow the hours onto each job.
How to tell if this is missing: your crews clock in and out, but there's no job on the time entry. Or they don't clock in at all and the foreman texts hours on Friday.
If you can't get hours by job yet, there's a fallback. Crew pay can be spread across the week's jobs by footage installed. It's rougher, but it's far better than leaving crew pay out of the job cost entirely.
What you get when all four are true
A job report by fence type that shows, for each one, what you billed, what it cost you to build, and what was left after materials and crew. After one season you can see what each type leaves you per foot.
That's the number to bid from. It also tells you which crews are fast on which work, which is a conversation worth having in March instead of August.
Setting this up is part of monthly bookkeeping with job costing. The setup happens once, and then each month's close keeps it right.
Book a free call. Thirty minutes, and you leave with a written list of what's wrong in your books and what each fix costs.