The spreadsheet is called Jobs2025 final v3. It has a tab per project, a column for estimate and a column for actual, and the actual column is three months behind, because filling it in means opening every supplier invoice and deciding which job it belongs to.
So you find out which jobs made money about a quarter after they finished. By then you have quoted four more at the same rates.
Here the matching happens as the invoices arrive. A merchant invoice lands in your inbox. The system reads it, finds the job reference or the delivery address, and books the amount against that project. Where there is no reference it asks you, one tap, which job. Timesheets go the same way, hours against jobs at each person's rate.
What you get is one page per job. Estimate on the left, cost so far on the right, split into materials, labour and subs, updated each time an invoice comes in. A job that is 60 percent through and already at 80 percent of estimated cost shows up in orange while there is still time to do something about it.
The pattern you tend to find is uncomfortable. The small jobs, the ones taken on to keep a fitter busy for two days, come in over estimate far more often than the big ones. And the labour rate in the quote template has not moved since 2022.
The evenings with the spreadsheet stop. The data still goes into Xero or QuickBooks as it always did. The job page is a view of it that stays up to date.
We build the job page as a Google Sheet or a small dashboard, fed from your accounts package and your inbox. Which job did you finish last month, and do you know yet what it cost?