How do I know which jobs are actually making money?

He has not turned a spanner in four months. He did not open a business to stand at a counter doing paperwork, and yet the paperwork is the only thing that would tell him whether last month's biggest job was worth taking. Most small business owners can tell you which jobs were a pain. Very few can tell you which ones actually made money, because nobody is writing down the real hours against the real price.

This does not need a full accounting system to fix. A rough note of hours and materials against each job, kept for a month, is usually enough to show a pattern: which job types are worth chasing, and which ones are quietly costing more than they earn once your time is counted properly.

The businesses that get real value from this are not the ones with the fanciest spreadsheet. They are the ones who actually look at it once a month and change one thing based on what it shows, whether that is quoting a job type higher or simply saying no to it next time.

The habit is more valuable than the tool. A single column added to whatever you already use to track jobs, filled in for even half of them, is enough to see which type of work is quietly subsidising another. Most owners are surprised by which job it turns out to be, because the annoying jobs and the unprofitable ones are rarely the same jobs.

It is worth doing this even for a business that feels too busy to track anything extra. The busier you are, the more a slightly unprofitable job type is quietly costing you, because you are running more of them and noticing less.

A Three Fixes report looks at what you already track, if anything, and hands you a simple way to start seeing which jobs are worth the time, written for how your business actually runs.