If you’re honest, you probably don’t have a job costing problem—you have a data problem.
Labor, materials, subs, equipment, overhead… the job costs are already there. They’re just trapped across work order systems, spreadsheets, emails, and your accounting package. By the time someone pulls it all together, the job is over, the team has moved on, and it’s too late to fix the margin.
An integrated ERP like SAMPro is built to solve exactly that: pull costs in from every corner of the business and give you real-time visibility into which jobs, contracts, and customers are actually profitable.
The Problem with “Spreadsheet Job Costing”
Most contractors start small:
- Costs live in QuickBooks or another accounting software
- PMs or controllers export data into Excel
- They build custom job reports to figure out where money went
It works—until volume and complexity spike:
- Service and construction work in the same company
- More technicians, more subs, more branches
- Bigger contracts and tighter expectations on price and delivery
Suddenly, job costing becomes a full-time job, not a simple report.
When costs are stitched together manually, you get three bad outcomes:
- Lagging visibility – You learn about margin hits weeks or months later.
- Inconsistent truth – Finance, service, and project teams never agree on the numbers.
- Guesswork pricing – Estimating uses stale or incomplete cost history.
What Integrated Job Costing Looks Like in SAMPro
SAMPro treats job costing as the backbone of your ERP system, not an afterthought. Data is collected automatically from across the platform and flows into a unified job cost record:
- Work Order Management – Labor, materials, and expenses from each ticket feed job costs.
- Payroll & TimeAnywhere – Field time and expenses roll into the job without double entry.
- AP & Purchasing – Vendor invoices and POs are coded to jobs and cost codes as they’re processed.
- Service Billing & Construction Invoicing – T&M, PM billing, progress invoices, and retainage all live in one system.
No rekeying. No reconciliation across random tools. No “who has the latest spreadsheet?”
Real-Time Costing, Not Just End-of-Job Autopsies
Because job costs update as data is collected from the field, purchasing, and accounting, SAMPro gives you real-time data on:
- Budget vs actual by cost code
- Committed costs vs remaining budget
- Margin trend over the life of the job or contract
The construction management suite is literally designed so that job costing software receives information automatically from other areas—Work Order Management, Payroll, Invoicing, AP and Purchasing—removing the need to double-post anything.
This is where data analytics and DBAnalytics come into play: you can compare projected budgets to actual construction data for real-time accountability and decision-making.
Better Bids, Not Just Better Reports
Once you trust your job costing, you stop pricing work on gut feel:
- See which customers, job types, and divisions consistently hit or miss target margin
- Use historical data to sharpen labor productivity assumptions
- Build estimates that reflect reality instead of wishful thinking
The result: fewer losing bids disguised as “strategic wins” and a much cleaner project portfolio.
Where SAMPro Fits in Your Stack
SAMPro is not just “job costing software.” It’s the integrated ERP platform that ties job costing to:
- Field Service Software (Scheduling & Dispatch, Work Order Management, PM Contracts)
- Construction Management Software (Project Managers Workbench, Construction Invoicing, Remote Time Entry)
- ERP Accounting Suite (AP, AR, GL, Payroll, Billing & Invoicing, Multi-Company Accounting)
That’s how you get job costing that isn’t a side project—it’s just how the system works.
Book a SAMPro demo to see how integrated job costing and real-time analytics give you the clarity to bid smarter and protect every project’s profit.
