Job-level cost breakdowns

What a job's cost breakdown is

Every job carries one cost record underneath it: labor, material, equipment, subcontractor, overhead, and other. Those six numbers add up to a job's Total Cost, and Total Cost against what the job actually brought in is what turns a billed dollar figure into a real, burdened margin. This is the job-level detail that everything else on Margin (the Cost Structure ratios, the by-type comparisons, the portfolio margin trend) rolls up from. If you have not read Understanding your margin yet, that article is the portfolio-level picture this one feeds.

Verinode does not decide what a job should have cost. It reads whatever actual cost documents you have forwarded or connected, and where a job does not have one yet, it estimates from your own cost profile so you are never left staring at a blank margin number. Every figure is labeled with which of those two it is, so you always know whether you are looking at a real cost or a modeled one.

Where to find it

There is no standalone Costs page anymore. If you land on /costs, Verinode sends you to Margin instead, carrying your query string with it, see Costs: now part of Margin for what moved and why. Job-level cost detail lives one level lower than the portfolio Cost Structure tab: it is the per-job record you see when you open a specific job.

• Open Jobs from the sidebar, find the job (search, filter, or the calendar view all work), and tap the card or row to open its profile.
• Inside the job's profile, go to The Numbers tab, the third tab across the top. Cost detail sits in the Burdened Cost & Margin section, below Revenue.

Reading the Burdened Cost & Margin section

The section title is Burdened Cost & Margin, and directly under it a one-line subtitle tells you where the numbers came from (covered below). Underneath, two columns of fields:

• Labor, the job's labor cost.
• Materials, the job's material cost.
• Subcontractor, what you paid subs on the job.
• Equipment, equipment cost attributed to the job.
• Overhead, the overhead burden allocated to the job.
• Total Cost, the sum of every cost line on the job's record, including an "other" line that does not get its own field here. If a job carries an other cost, Total Cost will run a bit ahead of what Labor through Overhead add up to on their own, that gap is the other line.
• Gross Margin, collected minus direct cost, before overhead. The hint under the number says exactly that.
• Net Margin, the same margin after overhead is subtracted too. This is your real, burdened profit on the job.

Dollar figures on this screen are abbreviated for readability: a value at or above $1,000 shows in thousands with one decimal ($2.7k), at or above $1,000,000 in millions ($1.2M), and anything under $1,000 shows the full rounded dollar amount. A cost that is genuinely zero and a cost Verinode has no data for look identical here, both show as a dash, because there is nothing meaningful to distinguish them on screen.

Where the label under the section title comes from

The subtitle tells you, in plain language, how solid the numbers above it are:

• "From your invoices and estimates." The job has an actual, itemized cost record on file. This is the strongest read, every field reflects a real document.
• "Estimated from your cost profile, forward invoices to firm it up." No actual cost record exists yet for this job, so Verinode filled in the numbers using the cost profile you configured under Margin.
• "Estimated from restoration industry averages, forward invoices to firm it up." Neither an actual record nor a configured cost profile exists, so Verinode fell back to a restoration-sector composite just to give you a directional number.

Both estimate labels carry the same nudge for a reason: an estimate is a placeholder, not a substitute for the real thing. The moment an actual cost document lands for that job, it replaces the estimate for that job specifically, nothing else on your book changes.

Where an actual cost record comes from

You do not type a job's labor, material, and equipment numbers into a form. An actual job cost record reaches Verinode from documents, matched to the job automatically by claim number:

• A job costing report or cost export you forward or connect, from QuickBooks, Xero, Power BI, or a SERVPRO WorkCenter export. Verinode reads which system it came from and tags the record with that source, so provenance travels with the number even though you never see the raw tag on screen.
• Manually entered or corrected figures, recorded the same way, distinct from an import.

One thing worth knowing: a Xactimate estimate is a price document, what you will bill the carrier, not a cost document. Verinode routes its numbers into the job's Estimated amount, RCV, ACV, and related fields in the Revenue section above this one, not into the cost record. So forwarding an estimate firms up what you expect to collect; it does not, by itself, firm up what the job cost you to run. That takes an actual cost report or invoice.

How the estimate is derived from your cost profile

When there is no actual cost record, Verinode builds one from the cost profile you set up under Margin: your labor rate, average crew size, overhead percentage, material markup percentage, and average hours per job category. The formula is fixed and the same for every job: labor cost is your hourly rate times your average crew size times the hours you have set for that job's category (falling back to your Water hours, then to 40 hours, if that category is blank); material cost is the job's revenue times your material markup percentage; overhead is the job's revenue times your overhead percentage. Labor, materials, and overhead added together are the estimated Total Cost.

Notice the profile-estimate formula only produces Labor, Materials, and Overhead, it has nothing to estimate Subcontractor or Equipment from. So on a purely profile-estimated job, expect Subcontractor and Equipment to read as a dash until an actual cost record fills them in. That is expected, not a gap in your data.

For the full walkthrough of the cost profile form itself, every field, the placeholder defaults it falls back to, and a worked example, see Your cost profile. If you have not set targets for what your cost ratios should look like against your peers, Setting cost and margin targets is the companion page for that.

Don't confuse this with "Collected vs Estimate"

The Revenue section above Burdened Cost & Margin carries its own field, Collected vs Estimate, with a hint reading "What you collected against the original estimate." That is a realization ratio, whether the money came in where the original estimate said it would, not a profit figure. Profit margin, Gross and Net, lives in Burdened Cost & Margin below it. If you are asked "what did this job actually make," the answer is Net Margin, not Collected vs Estimate.

Editing and corrections

The Revenue fields above (Estimated, Approved, Billed, Collected) are editable inline, hover a field and a pencil icon lets you correct it, with every correction logged. The six Burdened Cost & Margin fields are not: they are read-only, computed either from an actual cost record or from your cost profile. There is no button on the job's profile to hand-key a job's labor or material cost directly. To correct or firm up a job's cost, forward the invoice, cost report, or export that carries the real number, or tighten up your cost profile so the fallback estimate lands closer to reality.

Empty states

• No revenue figure on the job at all. The Burdened Cost & Margin section does not render. There is nothing to measure a cost against.
• No cost profile configured and no actual cost record. No estimate is shown. Verinode never invents a cost figure when it has nothing to build one from, see Your cost profile for what "configured" means.
• A cost that is genuinely zero. Renders the same dash as "no data yet." If Subcontractor or Equipment reads as a dash on an otherwise-populated job, check the subtitle first, a profile estimate legitimately has nothing there.

1. 1Open the job's profile and go to The Numbers.
2. 2Read the subtitle under Burdened Cost & Margin first, it tells you whether you are looking at real costs or an estimate.
3. 3Scan Labor through Overhead, remembering Total Cost may run ahead of their sum if the job carries an "other" cost line.
4. 4Compare Gross Margin and Net Margin, Net is the number after overhead, the one that answers "what did we keep."
5. 5If the read is an estimate you want to firm up, forward the invoice or cost report for that job, or tighten your cost profile if several jobs are estimating rather than reading actual.

Best-practice example

Say you run 3-person crews at a blended $38 an hour, carry 12 percent overhead, and mark up materials 18 percent, with Water jobs set at 24 hours. A water job billed at $9,000 with no actual cost record on file shows: Labor $2.7k (38 x 3 x 24), Materials $1.6k (9,000 x 18%), Overhead $1.1k (9,000 x 12%), Subcontractor and Equipment both a dash, and Total Cost $5.4k. Net Margin reads +39.6%, Gross Margin (overhead added back) reads +51.6%. The subtitle reads "Estimated from your cost profile, forward invoices to firm it up." A month later you forward the actual crew timesheet and material invoice for that job. The subtitle flips to "From your invoices and estimates," the Subcontractor and Equipment fields pick up whatever real numbers those documents carried, and every number on this one job is now real, without touching anything else on your book.

Related reading

• Costs: now part of Margin
• Your cost profile
• Setting cost and margin targets
• Understanding your margin
• How benchmarks work
• Connecting your data
• Forwarding documents
• The Feed

Data sources