What a sub costs you, job by job

What the Jobs & margin tab is

Open any subcontractor from the Subcontractors page and the Jobs & margin tab is the money view of the relationship: every job that sub has billed you on, what they cost you on each one, and how big a bite that cost took out of the job's value. A sub who is cheap per invoice can still be expensive per job, and a sub whose number looks large can be perfectly proportionate on a large loss. This tab is where those two stop being guesses.

The tab carries a badge with the count of jobs the sub has been billed on, and it opens with two figures: Total sub cost, everything this sub has billed you across all their jobs, and Jobs, how many jobs that spend is spread across.

Current and past, ranked by cost

Below the totals, the sub's jobs split into two stacks. Current holds the jobs still open, the ones where this sub's cost is still accumulating and still actionable. Past holds the closed ones, the record you judge them on. Within each stack, jobs rank by this sub's cost, largest first, each as a bar: the bar's length is the sub's cost on that job relative to their biggest one, the label names the job by its client and category (for example "Hartford · Water"), and the dollar figure on the right is what the sub billed on it.

The share underneath: sub cost against job value

Under each bar, where the job carries a claim value, a share reads how much of the job this sub consumed: "38% of job value". The math is straightforward: the sub's cost on the job divided by the job's net claim value. That share is the number that connects a sub to your margin. Your margin on a job is what is left after every cost comes out of the claim, so a sub taking 20 percent of a job's value leaves room, and a sub taking half of it usually does not.

The bars carry that judgment visually. A job where this sub's cost reaches 40 percent or more of the job's value turns its bar red; everything below that renders in the neutral copper. Forty percent is not a rule that the job lost money, but it is the point where one trade is consuming enough of the claim that the job's margin depends on everything else going perfectly, and it is the same threshold the sub analysis uses when it puts a high-cost sub on watch.

Where the numbers come from

Nothing on this tab is entered by hand. The sub's cost on each job comes from the subcontractor cost lines on your jobs: when you forward a sub's invoice tied to a job, or bring in a job cost export from your job management or accounting tool, Verinode reads the subcontractor charges out of it and lands them on the right job under the right sub. The job's value comes from the same place the rest of the platform gets it: the net claim value read from your estimates and claim paperwork. The full picture of how job costs flow in, and how to read them across your whole book rather than one sub, lives in job costs.

If the tab is empty, it says exactly why: "No jobs yet. Their cost lands here as you forward the subcontractor invoices tied to your jobs." That is the artifact that fills it, and forwarding even one invoice starts the picture.

Reading the tab like an owner

Two passes cover it. First, scan Current for red: a sub sitting at 40 percent or more on an open job is a conversation to have now, while the job's scope and supplements can still respond, not at closeout. Second, scan Past for a pattern: one red bar is a hard loss or a big scope, but a sub who runs red across several closed jobs is structurally priced against your margin, and that is when the trade rankings and the Replace flow on this same card earn their keep.

Data sources