Job profit
Did that job actually make money?
A job feels profitable when the invoice is bigger than the materials receipt. Count your hours at their real rate, the miles, and the skip that turned up on day two, and the answer changes. Put one job's numbers in and see.
The job
Skip hire, waste carrier, parking, plant hire.
Site time plus prep, quoting and the wholesaler run.
What your time actually costs — see the day rate calculator.
Across every visit, at 45p a mile.
Mileage at HMRC's approved 45p rate, checked on 20 August 2026.
A worked example
A £1,200 job with £340 of materials looks like £860 of profit. Count 14 hours at a £30 real rate, 30 miles in the van and £60 of skip hire and the picture is £366.50 at a 30.5% margin — still a decent job, but less than half what the gut said. The hours themselves earned £56.18 each, which is the number to hold against your rate.
The forgotten costs are the pattern
Materials get counted because there's a receipt. What slips is everything without one — the second trip to the wholesaler, the hour of quoting, the parking, the waste run. One forgotten cost is noise; the same forgotten cost on every job is a margin leak that compounds across a year.
What to do with a bad answer
A job that earned £20 an hour isn't a reason to work faster — it's evidence for the next quote on that kind of work. Price the hours at your real rate, give the awkward access or the disposal its own line, and let the jobs that always run over tell you which work to stop taking.
grafter.ly does this on every job, not just the one you were worried enough about to work out by hand. Photograph the wholesaler receipt against the job and it shows what the job invoiced, what it cost you, and what's left. How the job figures work.
Price the next one on evidence.
Set it up yourself in minutes. No sales call, no card, no drip emails.
30 days free, then £25 a month. No card details to start.