Job costing in Jobber vs Housecall Pro: labor, materials and real profit per job

The invoice says $10,000. The crew was busy all day. Did the job make money—or just keep the van moving?

Housecall Pro is the lower-cost entry to job costing: Basic includes it at $79/month for one login. Jobber puts it on Grow and Plus; Grow starts at $199/month for one login. If you’re already on Jobber Grow, use the tools you have. The useful number comes from recording the hours and purchases once, then comparing them with what you sold.

Our software guide for painting contractors works through a room quote, materials deposit and completed labour/paint cost record.

Which workflow wins?

Choose Jobber Grow/Plus when your team already uses its timesheets, material line items and job expenses. HCP is the alternative when you want job costing without buying Jobber’s higher tier, or want an explicit expected-versus-actual view for flat-rate services. Changing software won’t rescue missing time entries or a supplier bill nobody assigned to a job.

Decision	Jobber	Housecall Pro
Job-costing plan	Grow or Plus	Basic and higher
Labor source	Job timesheets × employee hourly cost	Tracked travel/job time × fully loaded employee rate
Material source	Line-item quantity/unit cost; job expenses for separately recorded purchases	Material line-item costs or material job inputs
Estimated service cost	Keep quoted labor/material estimates separate from the actual costs you enter	Enable Show expected job costs to put service-line unit costs in a separate expected section
Useful report	One-off jobs report with labor, line-item, expense, total cost and profit columns	Job-costing reports by date, business unit or job type
QuickBooks Online gate	Connect+ includes the integration; Grow adds job costing	Essentials/MAX for QBO; Basic costing alone doesn’t include the connector

The feature details come from Jobber job costing and HCP’s complete setup guide. The HCP QBO onboarding guide names its integration tiers; the pricing pages below show the plan gates and standard rates.

For the wider software decision, use Jobber vs Housecall Pro. This comparison follows the money inside one completed job.

What the job-costing plans cost

These are staff logins, including the owner or office if they need access. Standard US prices, excluding introductory promotions, taxes and optional extras. Annual columns are monthly equivalents paid on annual billing—not yearly totals.

Logins	Jobber Grow / month	HCP / month	Jobber Grow / month billed annually	HCP / month billed annually
1	$199	$79	$149	$59
3	$257	$189	$229	$149
8	$386	$329	$299	$299

Jobber’s three-login monthly price uses Grow’s one-user bundle plus two $29/month seats. Eight uses the five-user bundle plus three seats. Annual extra-seat prices aren’t published in that tooltip, so the annual column uses the cheapest published Grow bundle that already covers the logins: one, five or ten. Jobber standard pricing.

HCP uses Basic for one, Essentials for three and Max for eight. A solo owner who needs HCP’s QuickBooks Online connector needs Essentials, so that owner’s software budget becomes $189/month or $149/month billed annually, rather than the Basic figures. HCP pricing.

The full plan choices are in our Jobber pricing guide and HCP pricing guide.

Jobber: put a cost beside the time and materials

Set the labor cost before the crew starts

In Manage Team, enter each employee’s hourly cost. Include wage, employer taxes and benefits—not the hourly rate you charge the customer. Timesheets on the job then turn recorded time into labor cost.

Set rates before recording the work. Jobber applies a changed rate to future timesheets, leaving earlier entries at their recorded cost. Stop the visit timer at the end of the work: a running timer hasn’t been included in labor cost yet.

Give materials a unit cost, then assign the other expenses

Add quantity, unit cost and customer-facing unit price to the job’s material line items. The unit cost is your purchase cost; the unit price is what you sell. Use actual supplier costs for this job rather than leaving last season’s estimate untouched.

Log separate job expenses such as a permit or disposal charge against the same job, with the receipt. On Plus, supplier invoice scanning can draft expenses and match jobs using the purchase-order number; review and approve those drafts. That scanning feature is separate from Grow’s manual expense entry.

Keep each dollar in one cost bucket. If the equipment cost is already on a material line item, entering the same supplier invoice as another job expense counts it again. The same problem appears if you put labor cost on service line items and also record it through timesheets. Jobber explicitly documents this double-counting issue. Jobber labor, materials, expense entry and scanning.

Alternative: HCP: make expected costs and actual costs do different jobs

Enable Settings → Jobs → Costs & Materials → Show job costing breakdown. Turn on Travel and time on jobs and enter fully loaded employee rates. HCP’s setup combines base pay with additional employer-paid costs, entered as amounts or percentages, then applies the rate to tracked time, including travel.

As with Jobber, set the rate before the time is recorded: changing it afterward doesn’t retroactively recalculate already tracked labor. Give travel a home in the record so a two-hour supply run doesn’t vanish from the job.

For materials, add a unit cost to material line items, or enable Material job inputs for costs you want to keep separate from the customer invoice. Miscellaneous job inputs handle other direct costs. If your flat-rate service already carries a budgeted unit cost, enable Show expected job costs: that service cost sits in the expected section while tracked labor, materials, commissions and miscellaneous costs form the actual section. HCP costing configuration.

Material inputs don’t change the price or appear on the invoice. On Essentials or Max, the flat-rate Price Book can also populate material inputs from configured services. Use that to give the crew a material list, then update quantities/costs to match the job; don’t also enter the same purchase as a second material cost. Job inputs don’t carry over on recurring jobs. HCP job inputs and flat-rate services.

Key takeaway: An estimate tells you what you hoped to spend. The actual-cost record tells you what the job used. Keep both useful by keeping them separate.

Worked example: one HVAC replacement job

Here is a planning example you can enter into either workflow. Every amount and rate below is an assumption, not a market quote or a customer story. The selling price is $10,000 before tax, with no discounts, tips or commission. Both workers log ten hours each, including travel: 20 person-hours, not ten.

Input	Calculation	Cost or revenue
Selling price	One completed replacement	$10,000 revenue
Equipment	Supplier purchase cost	$4,200
Consumables	Fittings, pad and other job materials	$350
Lead labor	10 hours × $50 loaded cost/hour	$500
Helper labor	10 hours × $32 loaded cost/hour	$320
Permit	Direct job expense/input	$150
Disposal	Direct job expense/input	$100
Materials subtotal	$4,200 + $350	$4,550
Labor subtotal	$500 + $320	$820
Other direct costs	$150 + $100	$250
Total job cost	$4,550 + $820 + $250	$5,620
Gross job profit	$10,000 − $5,620	$4,380
Gross margin	$4,380 ÷ $10,000	43.8%

In Jobber, put equipment/consumables in material unit costs, record each worker’s ten hours at the loaded rate, and log permit/disposal as separate expenses. In HCP, use material line items or material inputs, recorded labor, and miscellaneous inputs for permit/disposal. If using HCP’s expected service-cost section, leave that budget separate from these actuals. The row calculations are the same; the screens and cost buckets differ.

Two extra hours for each worker cost $164. Total cost becomes $5,784; gross profit falls to $4,216, or 42.16%. That’s why travel and return visits belong in the record.

Now enter the $4,200 equipment purchase twice. The dashboard would show $9,820 total cost and only $180 gross profit. Nothing happened to the job’s economics; the data is wrong. Fix the duplicate instead of increasing tomorrow’s prices to compensate.

This is gross job profit, before general office overhead, software, payment/financing fees and business taxes. It isn’t the business’s final net profit or cash in the bank. The example also leaves discounts out so both systems use the same revenue basis.

Reports: find the jobs worth repeating

In Jobber, open Reports → One-off jobs report and show the expense, time, labor cost, line-item cost, total cost, profit and profit-percentage columns. Recurring jobs have a job-level costing calculation, but the help says job-cost reporting isn’t available for them. Completed jobs show a final profit percentage; in-progress jobs show costs so far. Jobber also describes discount inclusion as a gradual rollout—on a discounted job, match the dashboard revenue with the actual selling total. Jobber reporting and revenue behavior.

In HCP, review gross profit and margin alongside labor, material, commission and miscellaneous costs. Its report definition uses job subtotal minus discounts, excluding tax and tips. Filter by job type or business unit to compare replacement work with service calls instead of mixing everything into one average. HCP report definitions.

For the material side, HCP’s material usage report combines material line items and inputs across jobs/employees and can export CSV. Use it to spot repeated overruns or quantities that never get entered. HCP material reporting.

QuickBooks: agree which record owns the cost

Jobber’s new QBO integration: the initial import can bring unit cost into a product that doesn’t yet exist in Jobber. An existing Jobber product is skipped, so that import won’t refresh its cost. After setup, Jobber owns client/product/service changes and sends them outward. Don’t assume a supplier price change entered in QuickBooks will keep feeding back into Jobber. Jobber’s new item-sync rules.

HCP’s QBO integration: services and materials used on invoices sync; a new material item first goes across as a non-inventory item. That invoice/item path is different from a supplier bill, payroll entry or internal material input. Give the bookkeeper the actual invoices and cost records they need rather than treating a synced sales invoice as the whole cost ledger. HCP invoice and item sync.

Our Jobber vs HCP QuickBooks sync comparison covers the plan gates, directions and payment handling. Agree who maintains item costs, supplier bills and payroll, then reconcile one completed job together.

Close the job with a five-minute money check

• Stop timers and assign all travel/work time to the right job.
• Replace estimated material costs with the purchases and quantities actually used.
• Enter each permit, disposal charge or other direct expense once.
• Match the selling total, including any discount, with the completed work.
• Review gross profit, explain any overrun, and give the office the next pricing or process change.

Our pick is Jobber Grow/Plus for a crew already capturing time, materials and expenses there; HCP is the alternative with job costing on its entry plan. In either app, the daily habit matters: capture the cost while the job is fresh, then use the result to price the next one better.

Decide who gets the profit view with our technician and office permissions guide. It separates billing, crew access and payroll responsibilities.

For the weekly handoff, use our Jobber vs HCP timesheets and payroll guide to review hours, reconcile overtime and send one checked week to payroll.

Moving a parts spreadsheet into the app? Our Jobber vs HCP price-book guide covers CSV imports, labor rates and keeping markup separate from margin.

A free warranty return still consumes hours and parts. Our Jobber vs HCP callback workflow keeps the original job reference, return visit and rework costs together.

For the parts run itself, our Jobber vs HCP purchasing workflow covers supplier orders, receipt capture, returns and counting the material cost once.

For the weekly owner review, put those margins beside cash and unbilled work in our Jobber vs Housecall Pro reports dashboard guide.