Three sheets you can copy below: a job cost sheet, a weekly time sheet with a column most trades leave off, and a month-end checklist. All of them exist to answer one question your accounts will not answer for you.
Your books tell you whether the business made money. They do not tell you which jobs lost it. A solo trade can have a perfectly clean set of accounts, a healthy annual figure, and still be taking on the kind of work that quietly loses money every time.
Your books and your jobs are two different questions
There are two separate exercises and they get confused constantly.
- Bookkeeping records what came in and what went out. It is what you need for tax, for the bank, and for knowing whether the year was any good. It is organised by date and by category.
- Job costing records what a specific job cost you against what you invoiced for it. It is organised by job. It is the only one that tells you which type of work to stop taking.
Bookkeeping is not optional – that is a compliance question, and the specifics of what you must keep and for how long are set by your tax authority, so ask an accountant rather than a website. Job costing is optional, and it is the one that changes what you earn.
If you only ever do one of the two properly, most people should do the compliance one because they have to. But if you have ever finished a job and thought “that one felt like it went badly” without being able to say why, the second one is what you are missing.
The hours you do not bill are the business
Here is where the money actually goes. You quote at, say, $95 an hour. You work a nine-hour day. But of those nine hours:
- forty minutes was the drive out and back
- fifty minutes was a supplier run because the fittings were wrong
- twenty minutes was on the phone to a different client about a quote
- and half an hour that evening was writing the invoice
You billed six and a half hours. You worked nine. Your real recovery is closer to $69 an hour than $95, and every pricing decision you make from the $95 figure is wrong by about a quarter.
This is not an argument for billing clients for your driving. It is an argument for knowing the number, so that the rate you quote covers the hours you actually spend. Most solo trades find their unbilled share sits somewhere between a quarter and forty percent of total hours. Almost nobody has measured it.
The job cost sheet
One page per job. Fill it in as you go, close it off when the last invoice is paid. The bottom three lines are the whole point.
JOB COST SHEET Job #________ Client _______________________________ Address ________________________________________________ Quoted / estimated $ ____________ Doc # ______________ ----------------------------------------------------------------- LABOUR HOURS COST ----------------------------------------------------------------- On site - me ______ ______ On site - apprentice / offsider ______ ______ Travel to and from ______ ______ Material runs ______ ______ Quoting and site visit (before job) ______ ______ Phone, admin, chasing payment ______ ______ Callbacks and warranty ______ ______ ----------------------------------------------------------------- TOTAL HOURS ______ TOTAL LABOUR COST ______ ----------------------------------------------------------------- MATERIALS AND OTHER COST ----------------------------------------------------------------- Supplier ____________ inv# ________ ______ Supplier ____________ inv# ________ ______ Supplier ____________ inv# ________ ______ Permit / inspection fees ______ Equipment hire ______ Subcontractor ______________ ______ Disposal / skip ______ ----------------------------------------------------------------- TOTAL MATERIALS AND OTHER ______ ----------------------------------------------------------------- THE THREE NUMBERS ----------------------------------------------------------------- A Invoiced (excluding tax) ______ B Total cost (labour + materials) ______ C Gross margin A minus B ______ Total hours (all rows above) ______ RECOVERED PER HOUR A divided by hours ______ Compare that last figure to the rate you quote. If it is lower, the gap is the hours you did not bill. ----------------------------------------------------------------- NOTES - what went wrong, what to price differently next time ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________
Recovered per hour is the number to watch. Not gross margin – margin can look fine on a job that ate three weekends. Divide what you invoiced by every hour the job consumed, including the quote you wrote before you had the work, and compare it to the rate you charge.
Do that on ten jobs and a pattern appears fast. It is usually the small jobs, the ones a long way out, and the ones for clients who need a lot of hand-holding.
The weekly time sheet
The section at the bottom is the one people leave off, and it is the reason to use the sheet at all.
WEEKLY TIME SHEET Week ending ____/____/______
Write the job number on every line. A line with no job
number is an hour you will never recover.
DAY JOB# START FINISH BREAK HRS WHAT
------------------------------------------------------------
Mon ______ _____ ______ _____ _____ ________________
______ _____ ______ _____ _____ ________________
Tue ______ _____ ______ _____ _____ ________________
______ _____ ______ _____ _____ ________________
Wed ______ _____ ______ _____ _____ ________________
______ _____ ______ _____ _____ ________________
Thu ______ _____ ______ _____ _____ ________________
______ _____ ______ _____ _____ ________________
Fri ______ _____ ______ _____ _____ ________________
______ _____ ______ _____ _____ ________________
Sat ______ _____ ______ _____ _____ ________________
Sun ______ _____ ______ _____ _____ ________________
------------------------------------------------------------
NOT ON A JOB - fill this in honestly, it is the whole point
------------------------------------------------------------
Quoting and site visits _____ hrs
Material runs and supplier waiting _____ hrs
Invoicing, chasing payment, paperwork _____ hrs
Vehicle, tools, cleaning, maintenance _____ hrs
Callbacks not charged _____ hrs
------------------------------------------------------------
BILLABLE HOURS THIS WEEK _____
UNBILLED HOURS THIS WEEK _____
TOTAL WORKED _____
Unbilled as a share of total: _____ %
Most solo trades land between 25 and 40 percent.
If you have never measured it, measure it for four
weeks before you change your rate.
Fill it in daily or it is fiction. Nobody reconstructs a week accurately on Sunday night, and a sheet you complete from memory will flatter you in exactly the places you need the truth.
The month-end checklist
Half an hour, once a month, in the same slot each time. The point is not the list – it is that the list stops you deciding each month which parts you can skip.
MONTH-END CHECKLIST Month ____________
[ ] Every receipt out of the truck, the ute, the toolbox
and the jacket pocket
[ ] Every receipt attached to a job number - anything
that cannot be attached goes to overheads, not to a
job that then looks profitable
[ ] Every supplier invoice entered, including the ones
on account that have not been paid yet
[ ] Bank feed matched to the last day of the month
[ ] Invoices raised for all work completed, even if the
job is not finished
[ ] Aged receivables printed - who owes what, how long
[ ] Anyone past terms gets a call this week, not next
[ ] Job cost sheet closed off for every job finished
this month
[ ] Money set aside for tax moved to a separate account
[ ] Compare this month's recovered-per-hour to last
month's
The one that matters is the second-to-last. Tax money
sitting in the working account is money you will spend.
FREE DOWNLOAD
All 3 sheets above, as one printable PDF
PDF · 6 KB · Real tick boxes and a notes area. Made to print and keep in the truck.
The receipt problem, and the only fix that works
Material bought on the way to a job, receipt in the door pocket, receipt gone. That cost never gets attached to the job, so the job looks more profitable than it was, and you price the next one like it.
Every fix that relies on being tidy later fails. The only one that works is capturing it at the counter: photograph the receipt before you leave the supplier, with the job number written on it or said out loud in the file name. Thirty seconds, standing there, while you still know which job it belongs to.
And the rule that makes the numbers honest: a cost that cannot be attached to a job goes to overheads, not to the nearest job. Guessing which job a receipt belonged to is worse than not recording it, because it makes one job look bad and another look good, and both conclusions are wrong.
Cash in the bank is not profit
A good month in the bank account can be last month’s work being paid, this month’s deposit on a job you have not started, and tax you are holding for someone else. None of that is profit, and all of it spends the same.
- A deposit is not earnings. It is money you owe in work. Spend it on materials for that job, not on the truck.
- Progress payments are not the job finishing. The last stage is where the margin usually is, and it is also the stage most likely to drag.
- Retainage is money you have earned and cannot touch, sometimes for months after the job is done. If a chunk of your contracts carry it, it belongs on the wall somewhere, not as a surprise.
- Tax is not yours. Move it out on the same day it comes in, to an account you do not carry a card for.
How much to hold and what you owe are questions for an accountant and for your tax authority, not for a guide. What is not an accounting question is the habit: separate the money the day it lands, not at the end of the quarter.
What to do with the numbers once you have them
Numbers you collect and never look at are just a chore. Three things to do with them:
- Set your rate from recovered-per-hour, not from what you bill. If you recover $69 on a $95 rate, and you need $85 to make the business work, your rate is $115 and not $95.
- Find the job type that loses. Sort ten closed job sheets by recovered-per-hour. The bottom two will have something in common – distance, size, a client type, a trade you took on as a favour.
- Quote the next one from the last one. The notes line at the bottom of the job sheet is worth more than the whole rest of the page if you actually read it before pricing similar work. The contractor estimate template is where that number ends up.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need accounting software as a sole operator?
Not to start. A spreadsheet and the sheets above will carry you a long way. What forces the change is usually volume of transactions and chasing payment, not complexity.
How long should I keep receipts?
That is set by your tax authority and it varies. Ask an accountant once and then follow it – it is not a judgement call and it is not worth guessing on.
For the federal baseline, the IRS page on how long to keep records sets out the periods and what they depend on. State requirements sit on top of that, and a licensing board may want job records for longer than the tax authority does.
Should I bill for travel?
Sometimes you can, often you cannot. Either way the hours exist. If you cannot bill them, they belong in the rate.
Do I track my own hours if I am the only one working?
Especially then. When you have staff, the hours are a payroll cost you cannot avoid seeing. When it is only you, unbilled time is invisible, which is exactly why it grows.
What is the single most useful number?
Recovered per hour, job by job. It catches underquoting, scope creep and slow payers all at once, and it needs no accounting knowledge to read.
Related guides
- Contractor estimate template – three you can copy, including the exclusions sheet
- Invoice template for contractors – time and materials, progress billing, and the change order form
- How to get a contractor license – the experience requirement, the exams, the bond
- Going independent as a tradesperson – the order to do things in, and when not to
When a spreadsheet stops being enough
A spreadsheet stops being enough at a specific point, and it is not the point most people expect. It is not the number of jobs. It is when the same figure has to be typed in twice.
Hours typed into a time sheet and again onto an invoice. A supplier invoice entered for tax and again onto a job sheet. Every double entry is a chance for the two to disagree, and once they disagree you stop trusting either one – at which point you have the work of a system with none of the benefit.
What to look for when you get there: it should let the hours you record become the invoice without retyping, attach a photographed receipt to a job at the counter, and show you recovered-per-hour by job without you building it. Everything past that is for companies with crews and payroll.