How to track material costs for each job

Last updated: September 2026

Why materials go missing

Material costs vanish in three predictable ways. The receipt is lost, so the cost is never counted. The receipt survives but nobody remembers which job it belonged to, so it becomes general overhead. Or the item was bought for one job, used on another, and quietly attributed to neither.

The consequence is not just untidy bookkeeping. It means your per-job margin is wrong in the direction that flatters, which is how a job type gets quoted at a loss for three years.

It also means a customer query about parts becomes a guess, and guesses lose arguments.

Record it at the counter

The single habit that fixes this is capturing the cost at the merchant, not at month end. Thirty seconds at the counter, with the job in front of you, replaces an hour of reconstruction later and is far more accurate.

What to capture is short: which job, how much, what it was, and a photograph of the receipt. That is enough for margin, for the customer query and for your accountant.

What to skip: the fine detail of every consumable. Screws, tape, sealant and the like are better treated as overhead than logged item by item, because logging them accurately is more expensive than the information is worth.

Where Dispatch fits

The Money feature is switched on in Settings and off until a business turns it on. Once on, income and expenses can be recorded against a job or standalone, you can photograph a receipt on site, and mileage journeys can be logged too.

Costs are permission-aware: a field technician can add a cost to a job without being able to see the books, which is the arrangement most small businesses want. Records can be browsed by tax quarter, and everything exports as a CSV for your accountant or your own records.

Because a cost attaches to the job, it sits next to the quote, the hours and the invoice for that work. That is the comparison that tells you whether the job made money, and it is the reason to record materials in the first place rather than only for tax.

Two things it does not do: there is no stock or van inventory, so materials are recorded as costs rather than counted as stock, and nothing reads a receipt photograph for you. Someone types the figure.

Marking up materials without an argument

Most trades mark materials up, and most customers know it. The friction comes from surprise rather than from the markup itself.

Two approaches work. Quote materials and labour as one price for the job, so the question does not arise, which suits domestic work. Or itemise honestly at your selling price, which suits commercial customers and landlords who compare line by line.

What causes trouble is showing the trade price and adding an unexplained percentage on a separate line. That invites the one conversation you do not want to have on site.

Materials the customer supplies

Worth a rule, written down once. If a customer supplies the part, record it on the job as supplied by customer with no cost, and be explicit in the write-up about what you fitted and what you cannot warrant.

This is the most common source of a dispute six months later, and the completion report is where you settle it: what you fitted, what condition it was in, what you advised.

For the hours half of the same calculation, tracking time on jobs covers the labour side, and improving job profitability covers what to do once you have both numbers.

A minimum viable habit

If all of this feels like a lot, do the smallest version: photograph every receipt at the counter and attach it to the job. Nothing else.

That alone gets you most of the way, because the missing information is almost never the amount, it is which job it belonged to. The amount is on the receipt; the job is only in your memory for about four hours.

Add the rest later, when the habit is established and you want the numbers for pricing rather than only for the accountant.