Profitability Report

Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity. The Profitability Report tells you what you actually kept after the costs of doing the work — per job, per customer, per service type, per tech.

What it shows

For any time period:

Revenue — billed amount
Direct costs — labor cost (time × cost rate) + materials/parts (expenses) + sub-contractor fees + mileage
Gross profit — revenue − direct costs
Gross margin % — gross profit / revenue
Overhead (if you've set it up) — allocated to jobs proportionally
Net profit — gross profit − overhead
Net margin %

Per-job profitability

Click any job to see:

Revenue (line items × price, after taxes)
Time logged × cost rate per tech = labor cost
Expenses tagged to the job × markup → cost basis
Materials, fuel, sub-contractors
Mileage
→ Job profit and margin %

This is gold. Some jobs make great margins; some bleed money. The report shows you which.

Per-service profitability

Pivot to see margin by service category:

"Plumbing — 42% margin"
"HVAC — 38% margin"
"Drywall repair — 28% margin"

Drives pricing decisions: are you under-pricing certain categories?

Per-customer profitability

Some customers are gold (high margin, low hassle). Some are kryptonite (small jobs with constant call-backs eat your margin). The report shows which is which.

Per-tech profitability

Each tech's revenue, hours logged, and resulting margin. Helpful for:

Identifying who works profitably and who needs coaching
Justifying pay increases for top performers
Spotting mis-pricing (some techs may be selling at a discount)

Cost-rate setup

For accurate labor costs, configure:

Settings → Team Members → [tech] → Cost Rate
Hourly rate you actually pay them (including taxes, benefits, basically your loaded cost)
Update annually or on raise

Without cost rates, profit reports treat labor as zero — wildly optimistic.

Overhead allocation

Set up overhead in Settings → Profitability → Overhead:

Total monthly fixed costs (rent, insurance, software, owner salary, etc.)
Allocation method:
- Per-job (split overhead across all jobs in the period)
- Per-revenue (% of revenue)
- Per-hour (per labor hour billed)

Per-revenue is the simplest and most common.

Markup on materials

If you mark up materials, the markup contributes to gross profit. Make sure expenses are tagged "billable to customer" with the right markup so the math works.

Accuracy depends on inputs

Profit reports are only as accurate as your data:

Time tracking — every job needs hours logged for labor cost
Expenses — all parts/materials/fuel logged to the right job
Cost rates — current and accurate per tech
Mileage — logged for jobs that involved driving

The first month's report will look sketchy as data accumulates. By month 3, it's reliable.

What to do with the report

Re-price under-margin services — if drywall repair runs 20% margin while plumbing runs 45%, raise drywall prices or stop offering it
Coach low-margin techs — slow techs cost you more than you'd guess
Fire bad customers — if a specific customer has -10% margin (you're losing on every job), have a candid conversation or politely decline future work
Sell more high-margin work — bias your marketing toward services where margins are best

FAQ

My profit number looks negative — is the report broken? Probably not — usually data is just incomplete (time not logged, expenses missing) OR you genuinely had a loss period. Drill into specific jobs to spot the pattern.

What's a "good" margin? Service businesses commonly run 20-40% net margin. Above 40% is fantastic; below 15% is concerning.

Do tips affect profit? Tips go to your team (or you), not the business. They're tracked separately and don't affect job-level profit.

Should I share this report with my team? Most owners share aggregated views (per-service, per-tech if it's understood as a coaching tool, never as competition). Individual customer profitability stays at owner level.

How often should I look at this? Weekly for top-line, monthly for detailed analysis, quarterly for strategic decisions.