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Which jobs made money, and which you paid to do

A contractor logs what a job was quoted at and what it actually cost in labour and materials. The dashboard works out the margin on every single job and flags the ones that went underwater. This page is a worked example of that build, with the sample workbook to download.

For: trades that quote per job — lawn, fence, paint, cleaning, pest, hardscape
Needs: a job list with quoted price, labour cost and materials cost
This page: a read, plus a free .xlsx to open in Excel or Google Sheets
The paid build: $650 one-time, on your job types and cost categories

Every number below is invented. This is a sample workbook built to show the shape of the output — the businesses named in it do not exist, and neither do the amounts. Nothing here is a client, a result, or a case study. The client names were rewritten to fictional ones before this page was published, because the original sample was seeded from a real local contact list.

What the sample shows

Twelve jobs. Booked $44,600, spent $39,050, kept $5,550 — a blended margin of 12.4%. That is the number most owners can estimate.

The number they usually cannot: two jobs lost $1,100 between them, and four of the twelve came in either over budget or under a 15% margin. On a real book that money does not appear as a line item anywhere. It is simply absent from the total, which is why nobody goes looking for it.

Job	Quoted	Actual cost	Margin	Margin %
J-03 Bellamy Exterior Painting · exterior paint	$4,800	$5,300	−$500	−10.4%
J-08 Ridgeway Hardscapes · retaining wall	$6,800	$7,400	−$600	−8.8%
J-06 Brightline Cleaning · deep-clean contract	$1,800	$1,700	$100	5.6%
J-11 Trailhead Cycles · deck build	$3,100	$2,800	$300	9.7%
All 12 jobs	$44,600	$39,050	$5,550	12.4%

Sort by margin and the losses usually cluster by job type rather than by client — which is the actual finding, because a job type you lose money on is one you are still quoting the same way next month.

What is in the workbook

Jobs — one row per job — quoted, labour, materials, status. This is the only tab you type in.
Job Dashboard — margin per job, computed by formula, with each row coloured green (healthy), amber (thin, under 15%) or red (over budget), plus the portfolio totals and the money lost on over-budget work.

Take the workbook

Free, no email, no signup, no follow-up sequence. It opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets — the formulas are already in it, so you can delete the sample rows and put your own in.

Download the .xlsx ↓

Built by this script, which is public along with everything else on this site. The site does not serve _brand/ itself — GitHub Pages hides underscore directories — so the link goes to the repository.

What it does not do

It is a spreadsheet, not software. Nothing syncs; you type the jobs in or paste an export into the Jobs tab.
It only knows the costs you give it. Overhead, drive time and warranty callbacks are not in the sample — on a real build those become their own columns, which is most of what the paid version is.
There is no AI anywhere in it. The margin, the flags and the thresholds are arithmetic, and that is deliberate: a number that decides whether you re-quote a job type should be one you can check by hand.
The 15% "thin margin" line is a default, not a fact about your trade. It is one cell.

Prefer something you can press right now instead of a file to open? The live dashboard demo takes your own export and rebuilds itself on your numbers in the browser, and the free tools run without uploading anything.

Want this one on your own numbers?

Send the chore and I’ll rebuild a real piece of it on your own file, usually within a business day. Free, and yours to keep either way — no contract and no follow-up sequence.