• Payroll: You should be posting all payroll burden to the job. This includes workers compensation costs, Fica, Futa, state unemployment, health insurance, retirement that is paid on behalf of your employees, even the cost of your payroll service if they charge a per check fee with every payroll check they process.
• Equipment: When you use your equipment in the field, there should be an allocation of that equipment usage per hour or per mile to the job. If your equipment is sitting idle on the job but is required to be there by the owner, you should charge an "idle" rate for your equipment to the job. If you can’t use that equipment somewhere else during that time, it’s a cost to that job.
• Owner time: Does the owner drive out to the job twice per week to see how it’s doing but she’s paid salary? Consider charging the job for the time she spends on that job or allocate a percentage of overhead costs to the job to compensate for the time the owner spends overseeing jobs.

Look at your job reports line by line, see what areas are your best and where you could do better. Are your margins higher in one area than another? Maybe you should subcontract out certain tasks. Do what you do best and make money doing it all. There’s a lot to be said for someone who can find the right people to do the job and oversee that the job was done to perfection.

Your estimates should be very close to your actual costs. If they aren’t you should re-examine why. Are your estimators using old variables or are there costs that aren’t getting posted against the job that are included in your estimate?

The infamous profit cycle states that we begin with estimate, then the job starts and costs get posted to the job, we manage the job to be profitable and analyze reports to be sure that we’ve done everything correctly and left nothing out. If this is done correctly, the next estimate is perfected more than the last to be more accurate…and the cycle continues.