WORK ORDER COSTING, NOT JOB COSTING.
Project job costing and service work order costing are the same idea at a different level of detail. A project contractor costs a handful of jobs across months and can afford deep detail on each one. A service contractor closes thousands of work orders across days. Full detail per ticket costs more to collect than the decision it supports is worth. So you cost the unit that repeats: work order type, technician, agreement and truck.
There's no WIP schedule in a service business, because there's no long contract earning revenue against a schedule of values. Two reports take its place. The agreement margin schedule shows what each recurring agreement has cost to serve against what it has billed. The open work order report shows every ticket that's dispatched, completed but not invoiced, or invoiced but not collected. Together they do for a service company what WIP does for a sub. They tell you whether the revenue you booked is worth what it says, and whether the work you finished has been billed at all.
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Want it set up for you? Onboarding only, from $4,500 one time. Books migrated and job costing built, then your own team keeps it up.
WHAT IT MEANS.
Work order costing is cost measurement built at the unit a service business repeats. That's the cost of a work order type, the cost of a technician per billable hour, the cost to serve a recurring agreement, and the cost to operate a truck for a day. It doesn't build a full cost on every individual ticket.
Service business margins move too much by region for us to publish a benchmark you should price against. Labor rates, drive time, competitive density and what a market will pay for a recurring agreement vary more between two metros than between two trades. An average built from somebody else's book would be wrong in both directions at once. We build your targets from your own cost to serve, one work order type at a time.
The rules are the same even though the setup is different. Every dollar still needs one home. The coding still has to be identical across the whole business. The person buying parts, the person installing them and the person billing them still have to agree on where they go. What changes is the unit you cost and what you compare it to. A project sub compares actual cost against a bid line by line. A service contractor has no bid, so you compare against the catalogue price and the average cost of the last hundred work orders of that same type.
WHERE THE DETAIL BREAKS DOWN.
Per-ticket detail costs more than it returns
Full cost detail on every work order costs more than it gives back. Every extra field a technician fills in on the tablet comes out of billable time on every call, and thousands of calls a year make that a large number. The answer doesn't help once you have it, either. Knowing a single $380 ticket cost eleven dollars more than its average changes nothing about how you price, staff or dispatch. Cost detail is worth it where volume gives an average some weight. One ticket never has that volume.
The cost codes were copied off a project build
Most service companies that try costing start with a setup built for projects. It has seven categories, two or three levels deep, built to mirror an estimate line by line. A service business has no estimate to mirror. It has a catalogue and a price book. Codes borrowed from the project side make buckets nobody in dispatch or the field can read. So technicians guess, and the same repair goes to four different places across four trucks. The reports built on that are useless, however carefully the bookkeeper closes the month.
A losing agreement goes unseen inside a profitable month
A service P&L adds hundreds of small transactions onto one or two revenue lines. A strong month of replacement and install work will cover an entire agreement portfolio that costs more to serve than it bills. Nothing on the statement separates the two. The same goes for one work order type priced below its own cost to deliver. It goes for one technician whose callback rate doubles his true cost per billable hour, too. The month closes profitable and the owner believes the business is fine. The losing piece keeps growing, because it's the piece the sales team finds easiest to sell.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN DOLLARS.
Take a company closing 400 work orders a month and add five minutes of cost coding to each one. That's 2,000 minutes, or about 33 hours a month of field time spent on detail no report reads. These inputs are made up. They aren't a claim about your business. The direction still holds. The cost of collecting per-ticket detail goes up with volume, and the value of it doesn't.
A technician billing 6 of 8 hours is at 75 percent utilization. Add two extra stops a day at 20 minutes of drive time each, and 40 minutes comes off billable time. Over 240 working days that's roughly 160 hours, or a month of one technician's year. Route density is a costing question. Cost per technician per billable hour is the number that lets you see it.
An example agreement bills $3,000 a year across 12 monthly invoices. It covers four scheduled visits at two hours each, so eight hours of planned labor. Add six hours of callbacks that get coded to demand service when they belong to the agreement. Now the true cost to serve is 14 hours plus drive time, parts and truck. Whether that agreement makes money depends on your own loaded labor cost and truck rate. No industry average can answer it. The report has to show cost to serve for each agreement.
WHAT TO COST INSTEAD.
Cost per work order type is the first one, built as a rolling average off closed tickets, because it tells you whether each line of your catalogue is priced above what it costs to deliver. Cost per technician per billable hour is the second, loaded with burden and truck, because two techs on the same pay rate can differ by a third once callbacks and drive time are counted. Cost to serve per agreement is the third and the one most service businesses have never seen. Cost per truck per day is the fourth, and it settles fleet decisions the same way an equipment cost basis settles them on the project side.
Level 1 is the revenue stream: recurring agreements, demand service, replacement and install, and warranty or callback work. Level 2 is the work order type straight out of your price book, in the same words dispatch already uses. A technician closing a ticket picks the code without thinking about accounting at all. Cost types cross both levels: labor, material, vehicle, subcontracted and permit. The test is the same one we use on the project side, only here it's pointed at a catalogue. The person selling the work, the person doing it and the person billing it all have to agree on where a cost belongs before the first ticket gets coded.
Rework coded back to the original work order type disappears into the average and makes bad work look normal. Given its own Level 1 stream, it becomes a number you can watch by technician, by work order type, and by install crew. Most service businesses that fix one thing fix this one, because it's usually the largest single piece of cost nobody has ever been billed for and nobody has ever measured.
The agreement margin schedule lists every recurring agreement with what it has billed to date, what it has cost to serve to date including callbacks, and how many scheduled visits remain in the term. The open work order report lists every ticket by state: dispatched, completed but not invoiced, and invoiced but not collected. Completed and not invoiced is the service equivalent of underbilling, and it's where the money is held in almost every service business we open up. One hybrid case remains: a change-out or install that takes more than a couple of weeks and comes with a deposit gets treated as a small job with its own code and a cost to complete.
Weekly, you look at margin by work order type and by technician, completed and not invoiced, and callback count. Monthly, with the books closed by the tenth, you look at the agreement margin schedule and a P&L split by revenue stream. Quarterly, agreement renewal pricing gets set from measured cost to serve. It stops being last year's price plus three percent. The 13 week cash forecast goes alongside all of it. A service business collects in small pieces, and a slow week of dispatch takes about six weeks to reach the bank account.
THE OUTPUTS, NAMED.
FLAT MONTHLY FEE. NO SURPRISES.
Three tiers, priced by your trailing twelve month revenue. Which one you're in depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. We don't bill by the hour, and we don't do payroll. The one-time onboarding fee is in the table.
Built for subs doing $1M to $12M. Above $12.5M we quote.
| Last 12 months revenue | Core | Strategic | Platinum | One-time onboarding |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under $1M | $1,900 | $3,100 | $3,300 | $2,500 |
| $1M to $3.5M | $2,600 | $4,100 | $5,300 | $4,500 |
| $3.5M to $6.5M | $3,800 | $5,900 | $8,300 | $6,000 |
| $6.5M to $9.5M | $5,100 | $7,600 | $11,800 | $7,500 |
| $9.5M to $12.5M | $6,100 | $8,900 | $14,900 | $9,000 |
| Above $12.5M | Quoted | Quoted | Quoted | Quoted |
The onboarding fee covers migrating your books back to the start of your last taxable year and getting you fully operational in 60 days. It's billed once, with your first invoice. It's the same for all three tiers, and it moves with your revenue band. Your first month is prorated, and your monthly engagement starts on the first of the first full month.
Just want the setup? Onboarding only is the same onboarding work with no monthly service after it, one time, at the onboarding fee plus $2,000. Start a monthly engagement later and $2,000 counts toward it. It starts at $4,500, and the price for every band is on the pricing page.
The three tier columns are the whole price. Which one fits depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. No payroll. No hidden line items. The onboarding fee is right here in the table.
- Online software only: QuickBooks, Sage, Viewpoint and similar. No VPN or hosted desktop.
- Not in any tier: payroll, pay applications, collections on receivables.
- Pricing valid through 2027.
CFO work. Your own bookkeeper keeps doing the books.
We build your plan every month. Your team does the work.
You get the CFO work: job costing built to match the way you estimate, a 13 week cash forecast, WIP every month, and a monthly meeting that ends with decisions.
Your bookkeeper still does the books.
Core, plus bookkeeping and bank reconciliations, plus job costing and WIP software set up and managed for you. Use your own online accounting software or we supply it, one price.
We build the plan, track it and adjust it every month.
We only work with trade subcontractors. We know what to look for, and we fix problems while they're still small. Everything in Core, plus the bookkeeping and bank reconciliations done for you, and the job costing and WIP software set up, loaded with your cost codes, and managed every month. Use your own online software, or move to ours and we pay for it.
Our team does the bookkeeping and the reconciliations. We don't do payroll.
Strategic, plus a controller who handles payables and receivables the way an in-house controller would. You approve every payment.
We manage the money side for you, every week.
Everything in Strategic, plus our team does the controller work. We handle your bills and receivables the way an in-house controller would: we call vendors, pay the bills and keep the accounting current. We plan the cash flow first, and you approve every payment because it is your money.
Our team does the payables and receivables. We don't do payroll, pay applications or collections.
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