How Do I Track Which Painting Jobs Are Profitable?

To know which painting jobs make money, you track four numbers per job (labor hours at loaded cost, materials, subs, and a share of overhead) against what you charged, and you review margin by job type rather than by gut feel. The tooling can be a spreadsheet at low volume or job costing built into the tool that already holds the quote; RadiusOS includes job costing on paid plans, tied to the quote and invoice on the same customer record.

Most painters know revenue and have a feeling about profit. The feeling is usually wrong in a specific direction: the big jobs feel profitable because the checks are big, while the quick cabinet refinish that took a day and change quietly out-earns them per hour. Here is how to see it.

The four numbers per job

Labor at loaded cost. Hours times what an hour truly costs you: wage plus payroll taxes, comp, and the drive time and setup nobody bills. A $25/hour painter costs $32 to $38 loaded. Using the wage alone flatters every estimate you have ever written.

Materials, per job. Paint, sundries, masking, rentals. The habit that matters is assigning receipts to jobs the day you buy, not reconstructing at tax time.

Subs and rentals where they apply: the drywall patch guy, the lift for the two-story foyer.

An overhead share. Insurance, trucks, software, marketing, your unbillable time, divided across production. A simple percentage of revenue (often 10 to 20 percent for small shops) beats pretending overhead is zero, which is what "the job cost me labor and paint" pretends.

Revenue minus all four is job profit. Job profit divided by crew hours is the number that should drive your quoting, because it makes a $2,000 one-day job and a $9,000 two-week job comparable.

Reviewing it so it changes behavior

The monthly ritual: sort completed jobs by margin per hour, then look for patterns by type. Painters who do this reliably find a shape: interiors repeatable and solid, exteriors volatile with prep surprises, HOA and property-management work steady but thin, cabinets excellent when the shop process is dialed. The next quarter's marketing and the next estimate's pricing both come out of that table. Underquoted prep is the most common leak; it shows up as a job type that always runs 15 percent over on hours.

Tooling: spreadsheet, accounting, or the tool that holds the quote

Spreadsheet: fine to start, at the cost of manual entry per job and the discipline to keep it up. Works best under a handful of jobs a month.

QuickBooks job costing: accurate and accountant-friendly; the friction is that costs get categorized in the books, away from the quote and the customer, so the review ritual needs you to cross-reference systems.

Costing where the quote lives: in RadiusOS, the job record sits on the same customer record as the walkthrough, quote, and invoice, so quoted-versus-actual is one screen: what you estimated, what it took, and the margin, per job. Job costing is on paid plans at $19/month flat. RadiusOS does not sync to QuickBooks, so if your accountant runs everything through QB job costing already, staying there is reasonable and we would rather say so than sell you a second system.

Field service suites price this capability up-tier: Jobber gates job costing to its Grow plan at roughly $149/month annual (comparison), and painter-specific tools like PaintScout handle estimating-side production rates deeply while leaving actuals tracking lighter.

Start with last month, not next month

The fastest way in: cost your last ten completed jobs from receipts and payroll, even roughly. The pattern you find (which job types earn, where hours leak) improves your very next estimate, and that estimate is where profitability is actually decided. Then track forward so the review takes minutes instead of an evening.

The painting setup shows how the quote-to-job-to-margin chain fits together, and the follow-up guide covers filling the pipeline with the profitable job types once you know which ones they are. Start free and cost your first job this week.