Job costing

Job costing is the practice of tracking every cost — labor, materials, equipment and subcontractors — against a specific project (job), usually broken down further by cost code or phase. Its purpose is comparison: actual costs to date are measured against the estimate or budget so you can see, while the job is still running, whether each cost category is on track or bleeding margin. Without job costing, a contractor only learns whether a project made money after it closes, when nothing can be done about it. Good job costing depends on timely inputs — field time entries, coded vendor invoices and committed subcontract values — flowing into one system. In a construction ERP like DesignFlow Build, those inputs post to the job automatically, so cost reports reflect reality instead of last month.

Related term: Work in progress (WIP)