Quick Answer
Most trades businesses think they know what each job costs. They tot up materials, estimate the hours, maybe round up for fuel, then move on. The real cost usually sits 10 to 18 percent higher than the estimate. This free job costing sheet fixes that. Five tabs: a settings sheet for your hourly burdened rate and overhead allocation, a labour log, a materials log, a job summary that pulls everything together, and a dashboard that shows profit margin per job. Built for a sole trader or a team of five. Works in Excel and Google Sheets. Three minutes to set up your rates, two minutes per job after that.
Table of Contents
- Download the template
- Why most trades get job costing wrong
- What is in the spreadsheet
- Setting up your burdened rate and overhead allocation
- Using the sheet on a live job
- Using AI to predict job cost from history
- The four mistakes I see every week
- When a spreadsheet is no longer enough
- What UK tradespeople say about job costing
- Recommended videos
- Frequently asked questions
- My verdict
Download the template
The job costing sheet is yours to keep, edit, and roll out across your team. No email gate, no signup. We update it for the start of each tax year so the burdened rate logic stays current with NIC and pension auto-enrolment changes.
The spreadsheet is set up for any UK trade running between one and ten engineers. Plumbers, electricians, gas engineers, builders, decorators, roofers, anyone who quotes a price and wants to know what they actually made when the dust settles.
Two file formats sit inside the download. The Excel version uses standard formulas and conditional formatting that work in Excel 2019 and newer. The Google Sheets version is the same logic ported across so multi-user editing works without complaints from Microsoft licensing.
If you want to run the figures from a phone on site, open the Google Sheets file on the Sheets app. Materials log entries take about 20 seconds with the dropdowns we set up. Labour hours can sync from a job management app if you have one running, or get typed in manually at the end of the day.
The sheet works alongside the tools you probably already run.
Excel 2019+
Google Sheets
Xero (export-ready)
QuickBooks (export-ready)Why most trades get job costing wrong
The gap between estimated cost and actual cost is where margin disappears. On a £500,000 turnover that 12 to 18 percent gap is £60,000 to £90,000 a year sliding through the cracks. That is not a rounding error. That is a full-time engineer's salary disappearing into the space between your spreadsheet and reality.
Most of it is not theft and it is not laziness. It is small things that nobody captures in real time. Drive time between jobs that gets absorbed into the next day. Materials pulled from the van but never logged. Return visits that get scheduled in alongside new work. Fuel that gets posted as a monthly figure to the accountant and never allocated to a specific job.
Drive time between jobs. Idle time waiting for the customer. Materials pulled from van stock. Return visits to sort snags. Phone calls and admin between jobs. Tool wear. Vehicle depreciation. Workshop rent allocated per billable hour. Insurance per van per day. Most of these never make it onto an invoice but they all eat the gross margin you thought you had.
Industry research backs this up. According to CrewCost, a properly run job costing template cuts project cost problems by as much as 28 percent. The same data shows 55 percent of small construction businesses do not track all of their costs. Thirty percent admit they lose money on jobs because their estimates were wrong from the start.
The fix is not to estimate harder. The fix is to record what actually happens, compare it against the estimate, and use the gap to price the next job better. That is what this template is for.
What is in the spreadsheet
Five tabs. Each one does one job and feeds the next. No macros. No external lookups. No subscription. You can break it apart and rebuild it however you want.
Settings tab
One row per engineer. Columns for hourly wage, employer National Insurance, employer pension contribution, holiday accrual, sick leave allowance, training time per year, and non-billable admin hours per week. The sheet calculates a burdened cost per billable hour from those inputs. There is a separate block for overheads: rent, vehicle costs, insurance, accounting, software, marketing, owner salary. Total annual overhead divided by total annual billable hours gives the overhead allocation rate. Both numbers feed every job calculation automatically.
Labour Log tab
One row per engineer per job per day. Date, job reference, engineer name, hours worked, travel time, notes. The sheet looks up the burdened rate from the Settings tab and adds the overhead allocation. You get a fully loaded labour cost without anyone needing to do the maths.
Materials Log tab
One row per material line per job. Date, job reference, supplier, item description, quantity, cost price, sell price. The sheet calculates the markup per line and shows the running materials cost per job. A small markup column for non-stock items and consumables that get pulled from the van.
Job Summary tab
One row per job. Pulls total labour cost from the Labour Log, total materials cost from the Materials Log, adds any subcontractor invoices or external costs, and compares against the invoiced amount. Margin in pounds and margin as a percentage. Sorted by margin percent so you can see your worst jobs at a glance.
Dashboard tab
Pivot charts showing margin by month, margin by engineer, margin by job type, and the five worst-performing jobs of the last 90 days. The five worst is the most important view in the whole sheet. If the same engineer or job type keeps appearing, you have a pricing problem or a productivity problem. Either way, the dashboard tells you where to look.
Setting up your burdened rate and overhead allocation
This is the only part that takes thinking. Once it is in, the rest runs itself.
Start with the burdened cost of an engineer. Take their gross salary, add employer NIC, add the employer pension contribution, add an allowance for holiday and sick pay. Divide that total by the number of billable hours they actually deliver in a year. For most full-time engineers in UK trades, that is somewhere between 1,500 and 1,700 hours, not the 2,080 that a 40-hour week suggests on paper.
Example. Engineer on £35,000 gross. Employer NIC adds roughly £4,200. Pension at 3 percent adds £1,050. Holiday and sick allowance built into the salary already. Total cost to the business is £40,250. Divide by 1,600 billable hours and you get £25.16 per hour as the burdened rate. That is what they actually cost you for every hour they are on site.
Now add overhead. Total your annual overheads. Rent, business rates, vehicle leases, fuel, insurance, accounting, software, phones, marketing, owner salary, training, professional fees. For a one-engineer business that might be £35,000 to £45,000 a year. Divide by the same 1,600 billable hours. You get an overhead allocation of around £22 to £28 per hour.
Add the two together. Burdened labour at £25 plus overhead at £25 means every billable hour costs you £50 just to break even. If you are quoting at £60 per hour and the job runs over by 20 percent, your actual margin is gone. This is the maths most trades businesses never do.
The burdened rate and overhead allocation only change when your salary bill, pension contributions, rent, vehicle leases, or insurance premiums change. Review the Settings tab on 6 April each tax year, update the figures, and the rest of the sheet recalculates everything historical and forward. You do not need to redo it per quarter unless something material has shifted.
Using the sheet on a live job
The whole point is that it should take less effort than ignoring it. Here is the daily loop.
When you start a new job, give it a reference. Job 2026-074 or however you want to number them. Add a row on the Job Summary tab with the reference, customer name, quoted price, and start date. The sheet now knows the job exists.
During the job, two things happen. Every engineer's hours go into the Labour Log at the end of each day. Either typed by the engineer on their phone or entered by whoever does your admin. Every material purchase gets logged into the Materials Log when the invoice arrives from the merchant. If you pull stock from the van, log that too with the cost price you originally paid for it.
The Job Summary tab updates live. You can see margin developing as the job runs. If labour hours have hit 80 percent of the estimate and the job is only halfway done, you find out today, not three weeks after closeout. That is the whole game.
When the job finishes, you invoice as normal. Compare the invoiced amount against the total cost. The margin percent column tells you if you priced it right. Over time you build a library of real margins per job type and per customer. That library is what feeds better pricing on the next quote, and what feeds the AI prediction described in the next section.
Using AI to predict job cost from history
Once you have 30 or 40 jobs logged in the sheet, you have something useful. A dataset of actual margins by job type, by customer, by engineer. That is exactly what large language models like ChatGPT and Claude are good at pattern-matching across.
The workflow is simple. Export the Job Summary tab as a CSV. Open Claude or ChatGPT. Paste the CSV into the chat and tell it the job type, scope, location, customer, and estimated hours for your next quote. Ask it to predict the final cost and margin based on the patterns it sees in your history. Ask it to flag jobs in the history that look most similar.
What you get back is not a guarantee. It is a second opinion grounded in your own data. It will spot patterns you missed. Maybe every boiler swap in a flat takes 30 percent longer than every boiler swap in a house. Maybe one specific repeat customer always disputes a line item so your effective margin on their work is six points lower than the spreadsheet shows. The AI catches those patterns without you having to think about them.
Autodesk Construction Cloud research reports that AI estimating now achieves less than 5 percent variance from actual costs on bid day when fed enough historical data, and reduces project costs by 10 to 15 percent through better estimates and earlier risk flagging. The catch is the data has to be clean. A scrappy spreadsheet with missing rows produces worse AI predictions than no AI at all. That is why the discipline of logging every job in the same format matters.
If you are pasting customer names into a public AI tool you have a data protection responsibility. Replace customer names with a reference like Customer 27 before you paste, or use a private deployment of Claude or ChatGPT that does not train on your inputs. The maths works the same either way and you stay on the right side of GDPR.
The four mistakes I see every week
I have looked at job costing sheets from dozens of trades businesses over the past few years. The same four mistakes show up everywhere.
One: counting cost price as full cost. If a boiler costs you £900 from the merchant, that is not what it costs to put it on a job. You drove to fetch it. You stored it. You financed it for the 30 days before the customer paid. Add at least 5 to 10 percent on top of the cost price before you compare against the sell price.
Two: forgetting return visits. A first fix and a second fix on the same job are one job, not two. So is a return to sort a snag. Log all the hours under the original job reference. If you split them, you make the original look more profitable than it was and the return visit look like a free job rather than the margin hit it really is.
Three: leaving the owner's salary out of overheads. If you are the boss and you do not pay yourself a salary, the maths makes your business look more profitable than it is. The day you hire someone to do your job, the business does not actually generate enough margin to pay them. Put a market-rate salary for your role into the Settings tab even if you only draw dividends. The overhead allocation comes out honest.
Four: not reviewing the dashboard. A spreadsheet that nobody opens is worse than no spreadsheet. Block out 30 minutes every Friday afternoon. Open the Dashboard tab. Look at the five worst jobs of the past 90 days. Ask why. That is the whole workflow.
When a spreadsheet is no longer enough
This template will run a sole trader business or a team of up to five engineers comfortably. After that, the data entry burden gets heavy and the cost of one missed entry compounds across more jobs.
The signs that you have outgrown the sheet are usually familiar. Two people editing the same row at the same time. Engineers not logging hours because the workflow is too clunky on a phone. Material invoices piling up faster than they can get entered. A growing gap between what the sheet says you billed and what the bank account says you actually collected.
At that point you move to a connected job management platform. The architecture is the same as the spreadsheet, just automated. Engineers log time through the platform's mobile app. Materials get scanned from delivery notes. The platform pushes the data into your accounting software so the dashboard is always live. Have a look at how fleet-wide real-time job costing works if you want to see what the upgraded version of this spreadsheet looks like in practice.
Even if you are heading for a platform like BigChange, ServiceM8, Commusoft or Joblogic, run the spreadsheet for a few months first. The discipline of logging every cost manually teaches you what good data looks like, what categories matter for your trade, and what your real overhead figure is. When you then configure the platform, you set it up with knowledge instead of guessing.
What UK tradespeople say about job costing
Recommended videos
Why Job Costing Basics (Labor, Materials, and Overhead) Matter
The Construction CPA
Construction Job Costing: 3 Steps to Success
Foundation Software
Build Your Own Construction Cost Tracker in Excel
Tim Fairley (ConstructIQ)
Build Your Own Excel Estimating Template Step-by-Step
Tim Fairley (ConstructIQ)
Setting Up Job Costing for Construction Companies
Future Proof Accounting
Job Costing for Contractors Explained: Maximize and Scale
Rapid Result Creators
Frequently asked questions
Yes. Sole traders are the people who benefit most from it because there is no accountant or office manager catching the gaps for you. Spend ten minutes a week logging hours and materials and you will know within a month whether your day rate is sustainable. Most sole traders who actually run the numbers find they are undercharging by 15 to 25 percent.
Markup is what you add to cost. Margin is what is left after costs are taken out of the sale price. A boiler that costs you £900 sold at £1,200 is a 33 percent markup but a 25 percent margin. Most trades confuse the two and underprice themselves by 5 to 10 percent without realising. The spreadsheet shows both figures so you cannot get it wrong.
Accurate enough to be useful once you have around 30 jobs logged in the same format. Below that, the AI is guessing. Above 100 jobs, predictions get sharp. Autodesk research suggests AI estimating reaches inside 5 percent of actual cost when the data is clean. Your mileage depends entirely on how consistently you log every job.
Yes. The spreadsheet sits on top of your accounting software, it does not replace it. Xero or QuickBooks handles invoices, VAT and bank reconciliation. The job costing sheet adds the per-job profitability view that those systems do not give you out of the box. Export sales invoice totals from Xero monthly and paste them into the Job Summary tab to keep the figures aligned.
Make it easier than not doing it. Set up the Google Sheets app on their phones. Pre-fill the dropdowns. Pay them a small productivity bonus tied to clean weekly data. If you still get pushback, the engineers are telling you the workflow is broken. That is when you move to a job management app where logging happens through the same app they use for job sheets and photos.
Weekly for the worst-jobs list. Monthly for the margin-by-engineer view. Quarterly for the margin-by-job-type analysis. The weekly review is the most important one because it catches problems while you can still do something about them. The quarterly review feeds back into your pricing and your quoting decisions for the next three months.
My verdict
Every trades business owner I talk to says they want to grow. Then I ask what their margin per job is and there is silence. You cannot improve what you do not measure. This spreadsheet takes a Sunday afternoon to set up properly and ten minutes a week to maintain. The first time you spot a £4,000 job that actually lost you £400 once you accounted for the truck-roll, the diagnostic visit, the warranty trip back, and the overhead allocation, you will run this on every job for the rest of your career. Download it, set your rates, and start tracking. The numbers will tell you exactly which jobs are worth winning and which ones are sucking you dry.
The other free templates in this series fit alongside this one. The job estimate template handles the front end so your quotes come in priced for the right margin. The VAT invoice template handles the back end so HMRC and your customer both get what they need. The job report form captures the on-site evidence. Together they cover the full cycle from quote to closed-out, profitable job.
