Free tools for tracking job profit
Most tradespeople price by instinct and only find out at year end whether the work paid. These tools close that gap. The job profit calculator takes what you charged and what the job cost, including your own hours, and shows you the profit and margin straight away. The job costing spreadsheet template gives you a structured place to log costs job by job, so nothing gets lumped into one big pile you can never make sense of later.
Both are free, need no account, and work on a phone. Use them to sanity-check a quote before you send it, or to reckon up a finished job and learn what it really made.
Why a spreadsheet eventually is not enough
A spreadsheet is a fine place to start, and plenty of tradespeople run their whole business on one. But it has two weak spots. It only holds what you remember to type in, so the second parts run and the fuel receipt you meant to log never make it. And it lives on a laptop at home, while the costs happen in a merchant car park at eight in the morning. The gap between the two is exactly where a job quietly loses money without you seeing it.
If you want the full picture of how job costing works and why your own time counts as a cost, start with the complete guide to job costing, then the plain-English version of tracking job costs from receipts.
Get it automatic with VanReceipts
The tools above still need you to type the numbers in. VanReceipts does the typing for you. You scan a receipt from the van, it reads the total and the line items on your phone, and it matches the cost to the right job using where and when you scanned it. Add your hours, and the profit on each job keeps itself, with no spreadsheet to maintain. It is the same job costing these tools do, but it happens as you work instead of at the weekend.