Compare
Side by side
| Spreadsheet | Accountant | Job software | Profit Report | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free, plus your hours | Usually in your fee, or hourly | Included in your licence | £500 / $650 |
| Revenue by job type | Yes, if you build it | Not usually reported | Yes — this is its strength | Yes |
| Hours by job type | Only if you log them | No | Yes, where techs clock jobs | Yes, where your records carry them |
| True cost of an hour | Yes, if you know the method | Can be derived on request | Rarely — labour is a rate, not a loaded cost | Yes, built and shown |
| Profit per job type | Yes, with care | At company level, not job level | Gross margin at best | Yes |
| Every figure traced to a source | You are the source | Yes, to the ledger | No | Yes, marked per figure |
| A price to charge | You decide | Outside the engagement | No | Yes, per job type |
| Kept current | As often as you update it | Annually | Continuously | A snapshot of one year |
| Regulated advice | No | Yes, for tax and accounts | No | No |
| Turnaround | An evening to a fortnight | Weeks, in their cycle | Instant | 5 working days |
Option one
This is free, and for a firm with the hours and the method it is genuinely the right answer. Export a year of jobs, tag each one by type, add the hours, build your loaded labour cost, divide by the hours that actually reach an invoice, add vehicles and overheads, and compare each type against the result. Nothing about that is beyond an owner who is comfortable in a spreadsheet.
Two things make it harder than it sounds, and neither is intelligence. The first is utilisation: almost everyone divides labour cost by paid hours rather than billable hours, and that single step understates a floor rate by a third or more. The second is time — a year of jobs is a few thousand rows, most firms' job types are written four different ways across two systems, and the tidying is the bulk of the work.
If you want to do it yourself, we have published the method in full on the floor rate page — every step, with a worked example. It is the same arithmetic we run. We would rather you did it than didn't.
Option two
Your accountant knows things we do not and never will: your tax position, what is deductible, how the company should be structured, whether the year was actually profitable after everything below the gross line. On all of that they are the authority and we are not — we are not regulated to advise on any of it.
Per-job-type profitability is simply not what they are engaged to do. A standard engagement produces statutory accounts and a tax return from summarised ledgers; the job detail needed to split a year by work type usually never reaches them, and the hours almost never do. Ask and many will happily build it — as extra work, at their hourly rate, from data you would have to assemble anyway.
If your accountant already gives you profit by job type and you trust it, you do not need us. That is not a concession; it is the correct answer.
Option three
Field service software is very good at the half of the question it owns. It knows what every job invoiced, when, for whom, and often how long the tech was on site. If you want revenue by job type this month, it is already on a screen and it is free.
What it rarely knows is what an hour of your capacity costs. Labour usually appears as a rate somebody typed into settings — the wage, or the charge-out rate — not a loaded cost carrying payroll taxes, holiday, vehicles and overheads, and not divided by the share of paid hours that reach an invoice. Materials are often a percentage rather than what the job actually consumed. A margin computed on those inputs can be a long way out, and it will not tell you it is.
Some platforms do more than this and some firms have configured theirs properly. Check yours: find where the labour cost per hour comes from, and whether it is divided by paid hours or billable ones. If it is billable and the loaded cost is real, your software is answering the question and you should use it.
Option four
Twelve months of your jobs, split by type, each costed against the hours it consumed and held against a floor rate built from your own answers. Every figure marked with where it came from — measured off a record, taken from an answer, computed from the two, or judged — and every judgement listed with what it changes. Reviewed by a person before it is sent, in five working days, for £500 / $650.
What you are buying is not the arithmetic. It is the tidying, the method applied consistently, and a document where you can check any number back to the row it came from. If you have the hours and the method, the spreadsheet gives you the same answer.
The honest summary
When we are the wrong choice
If you are a sole trader or run fewer than about three field staff, there are not enough comparable jobs for the analysis to be sound, and no amount of care on our side fixes that. If a franchisor sets your prices, the half of the report you could act on is the half you cannot change. If you need an answer tomorrow, five working days is five working days and there is no rush option to buy. The full version of this list, with the reasoning, is on who it's not for.
No competitor is named on this page and none is characterised beyond what its own documentation describes. Where a row says “rarely” or “not usually”, it means exactly that — check your own tools before believing us about them.
If the fourth option is the one that fits.
£500 / $650 · 12 months of your jobs · 5 working days · refunded in full if nothing material is found