Job Costing on TradeSheets

What is job costing with examples: the £5,731 rewire

Sat, 07 Nov 2026 13:05:00 +0000

Job costing is adding up everything one job consumes — materials, your own days, subcontractors, overhead, a contingency — then setting that total against the price. The rewire below costs £5,731.19 and sells for £8,817.22. The gap is £3,086.03.

That is the idea, and it is almost aggressively dull. The hard part is not the arithmetic. It is deciding what counts as a cost, then leaving the answer alone when it turns out smaller than the quote you wanted to send.

Job costing spreadsheet for a plumber: the deposit that misses the boiler

Sat, 07 Nov 2026 12:50:00 +0000

The most expensive thing on a boiler swap is a box you never open. It arrives on a pallet, goes on the wall, and by the time you write the invoice it has quietly decided whether the job was worth doing. On the sample job below it is 67% of the cost. Everything else — your two days, the flue, the inhibitor — is the small half.

I ran two plumbing jobs through the same workbook I built for the electrician samples. A like-for-like combi swap, and a bathroom first and second fix. Both use the model in the free job costing template, and every figure here can be re-derived from the 113-line run log in the repo.

Free job costing template for Excel (and the one step most of them skip)

Sat, 07 Nov 2026 10:05:00 +0000

Search for a free job costing template for Excel and you get a grid with a materials column, a labour column, and a price somebody typed in by hand. I built the other kind. Five sheets, two worked jobs, named ranges instead of hardcoded rates, and a check cell that tells you when the arithmetic has drifted. It is free to download at the bottom of this page, and every number in this article came out of it.