Real-time job costing for painting and trades contractors on QuickBooks

To get real-time job costing in a painting or trades company, connect the systems that already hold the numbers: QuickBooks for revenue and bills, your time clock for hours, payroll for labor cost, and your estimating tool or CRM for the budget. Z&G Partners builds that connection for you. Each job's cost sheet rebuilds itself every night, and you see every job's profit every morning. Your crews do not learn a new app. Live in 30 days or your money back.*

What real-time job costing means

Real-time job costing means the job cost view rebuilds itself every night from your systems, with no numbers typed in by hand. For each job you see five things: hours, labor cost, revenue and materials, the estimate, and where it sits on your job list. You see them while the job is still running, not months after it closes.

Why job costing is usually one to three months behind

Because the numbers live in different places. Hours in one system. Paint in another. Money in QuickBooks. Someone types 20 numbers per job into a spreadsheet, 5 to 10 hours a week, and the answer is still three months late.

Owners and office managers tell us the same things: “job costing is three months behind.” “I had to go to three separate softwares just to get information.”

By the time you learn a job lost money, the crew has moved on. Crews give things away on jobs that are already losing money, because nobody can see it.

How we build it on QuickBooks, your time clock, and your estimating tool

• Hours: from your time clock, such as QuickBooks Time, BusyBusy or VeriClock, per person and per job.
• Labor cost: real pay rates from payroll, such as Paychex.
• Revenue and materials: invoices and supplier bills from QuickBooks Online or Desktop, matched to the right job.
• The estimate: the budget from your estimating tool or CRM, such as PaintScout or Salesforce.
• The job list: the jobs you already track, where you already track them.

The results land where your team already works, like a job cost sheet in Smartsheet or a job record in Salesforce. Anything the system cannot match is flagged to a named person on your team, never guessed. It only takes 3 to 5 hours of your team’s time and our team will do the rest.

What the owner sees each morning

• Every job’s profit, every morning.
• Labor hours and gross profit on a big job while it’s still running, so you can change course then instead of finding out two months later at bonus time.
• Owner and GM dashboards: revenue vs goal per crew leader, gross profit per hour, productivity, and billed vs recorded revenue.
• A short daily summary email.

“This is what we’ve been waiting five years to be able to do. It’s creating the job cost sheets in real time.”Kim Redfield, Stewart Painting

Timeline and the 30-day guarantee

Real-time job costing is live in 30 days or your money back.* The 30 days start the day we have working access to every system involved. If it is not running on its own and doing what we agreed by day 30, you get the build fee back. Days we wait on access or answers do not count. One garage door company had real-time job costing live inside 14 days, prevailing-wage jobs included.

*Terms in writing before we start.

What it costs

A flat fee to build it, then a monthly fee to run it. We quote both on a free 30-minute call once we know your tools. No hourly bills. No surprise invoices.

Proof

• 553 job cost sheets updated nightly at a painting company in Cape Cod. Job costing ran 90 days behind. Now it’s real time, and the 100+ hours a month they spent building, reviewing and reconciling job cost sheets are back.
• 2,030 jobs costed from Salesforce, Paychex and QuickBooks at a garage door company in Bend, Oregon, refreshed nightly.
• We added 100+ hours per month and $104,000 in profit to a painting company in Cape Cod.
• We added $228,000 in profit to a garage door company in Bend, Oregon, in 14 days.

Questions owners ask

Book a free 30-minute callWe take on 3 new trades companies per month.