Job Costing

How to Figure Out Which Jobs Actually Make You Money

You mow 30 lawns a week. You feel busy every day. But "busy" and "profitable" aren't the same thing — and without hours tracked per property, you genuinely can't tell them apart. Here's how to find out.

Job costing is just price divided by time

Job costing sounds like accountant-speak, but it's one number: what you actually earned per hour on that specific property. A $50 mow that takes 25 minutes is $120/hour. A $50 mow that takes 90 minutes — because of a steep slope, tight gates, or a yard that's grown out of control — is $33/hour. Same price, wildly different job.

Separate travel time from site time

The two most common blind spots are the same for every route-based business:

Drive time between stops — a client 20 minutes out of the way costs you real money before you've touched a blade of grass
Time on-site vs. time billed — if a job is quoted at 30 minutes but consistently runs 50, your price hasn't caught up to reality

Tracked separately, these two numbers tell you whether a client is unprofitable because of the drive, the yard, or the price — three completely different fixes.

Find your bottom 10%

Every route has a handful of properties quietly dragging the average down. Once you have real per-job hours, sort by dollars-per-hour and look at the worst five. For each one, you've got three options: raise the price, drop the client, or figure out why it's taking so long (steep grade, blocked access, overgrown beds) and fix the root cause instead of eating the cost every single week.

The habit that makes this possible

None of this works from memory or a paper log at the end of the day — the numbers get rounded, guessed, or skipped. It only works if the timer starts and stops automatically at each property, every time, without you having to remember to hit a button.

See your $/hour by property, automatically.

Install MowClock