How to price a job: the four numbers that decide your profit

Add up a year of everything you pay whether or not the phone rings. Truck payments and fuel, insurance, phone, software, the accountant, repairs, and your own wage. That total is what it costs to keep the doors open.

Now divide it by the hours you actually bill, not the hours you work. This is where the surprise lives. A one-truck operator working flat out usually bills somewhere between 900 and 1,200 hours a year, because quoting, driving, fixing equipment, and chasing payment are all hours nobody pays for.

The result is your cost per billable hour. Any price below it loses money no matter how busy the week looks.

Not how long it took the first time, and not how long it would take if everything went right. Take the last three visits to a similar property and use the middle one. If you have never timed it, time the next one properly, from arriving on the street to pulling away.

Include the drive between stops. A route that zigzags across town can cost an hour a day, and at your cost per hour that is a real number rather than an annoyance.

Price materials at what the supplier charges you today, not what they charged in spring. Add the waste you actually generate: the bags that split, the offcuts, the trip back for one more bracket.

A markup on materials is normal and defensible. You carried the cost, you sourced it, and you warrant the result.

Cost per hour times hours, plus materials, is break-even. Profit is what you add on top, and it is what buys the next truck, covers the slow month, and pays you for the risk of employing people.

Fifteen to thirty percent is the range most small field service businesses can hold without losing every competitive bid. Below ten, one bad job wipes out three good ones.

A quote is a guess until the job is finished. Once a month, take four columns: what you charged, the hours actually spent, what you invoiced, and what was paid. The pattern shows up by the second month, usually somewhere you did not expect.

The most common leak is not underpricing. It is work done and never invoiced: the return trip, the extra bag of mulch, the twenty minutes fixing something on the way past. A visit nobody billed looks exactly like a visit nobody did.

The worksheet is enough for one truck. Past that, the hours live on a crew's phones, the invoices live in a different app, and nobody has the time to reconcile the two. That is the problem Settles was built for: hours come off clock-ins, the invoice comes off the finished job, and profit per job is there without anyone typing it twice.

If you would rather just read more first, the field service management page covers how the whole thing fits together.