From an empty account to knowing what your jobs really make

Set up your company

Go to jobsbooks.com, choose Create your account, and enter your company name, email, and a password. Confirm the link that lands in your inbox and you're in — your company workspace is created with the name you typed.

First stop: Settings → Company Profile. Fill in your address, phone, and license number — these print on every invoice. While you're there, set two numbers that quietly drive everything else:

Tell it about your crew and your cost codes

Crew

Crew → + Add Crew Member. Name, role, hourly rate. The page shows both the raw rate and the loaded rate (rate + burden) so you can see what an hour on a job actually costs you.

Cost codes

Cost Codes already has 14 standard ones — site work, concrete, masonry, framing, electrical, plumbing, drywall, flooring, cabinets, landscaping, permits, cleanup, and so on. Add, rename, or renumber them to match how you actually bid. These codes are the backbone: budgets, costs, and estimates all group by them, so "am I over on concrete?" becomes a question you can answer.

Customers and vendors

Add them as you go — Customers for who you bill, Vendors & Subs for who you pay. You can also create either one mid-task from the ⌘K bar without losing your place.

Bid the work — and turn the estimate into a job

Estimates → + New Estimate. Name it, pick the customer, then add a line for each piece of the work: a cost code, a description, quantity, and your cost (not your price). Set the markup % and JobsBooks shows your bid price live at the bottom: cost, markup, total.

When the customer says yes, open the estimate and hit → Job. That single click:

• Creates the job with the bid price as the contract amount;
• Turns every estimate line into a budget for its cost code;
• Marks the estimate as converted so you know it's won.

That's the whole trick: what you bid becomes what you measure against. From here on, every dollar spent lands next to the number you promised yourself when you priced it.

Log costs from the field (with receipts)

This is the habit that makes the whole thing work, and it takes fifteen seconds at the lumber counter. Hit + Log Cost (top right, on every page) or press ⌘K and type "log cost".

• Job — or "🏢 Overhead — no job" for rent, insurance, the truck, anything not chargeable to a job;
• Category — Materials, Labor, Subcontractor, Equipment, Other;
• Cost code — so it lands in the right budget bucket;
• Vendor and amount;
• Paid From — Cash/Check, Credit Card, or "Not paid yet (A/P bill)";
• 📷 Add receipt — on a phone this opens the camera. Snap it and it's stapled to the entry forever.

Receipts are private to your company and stored in the cloud, so the shoebox in the truck can retire. Any entry with photos shows a 📎 badge.

Log crew hours

Time / Labor → + Log Time: job, crew member, date, hours. JobsBooks multiplies by that person's loaded rate and charges it to the job. Log it however suits you — daily per person, or once a week per person with the hours totaled.

Labor is usually the difference between a job that looked good and a job that was good. A crew of three at 40 hours is roughly $4,000 of real cost a week; leave it out and every job looks like it's winning.

Change orders — get paid for the extras

The customer wants the patio two feet wider. Change Orders → + New Change Order: pick the job, describe the change, put in the amount, leave it pending until they approve.

When they say yes, hit ✓ Approve. The job's contract value goes up by that amount automatically — so your margin, your "left to bill," and your WIP schedule all account for it without you touching anything else. Credits work too: enter a negative amount.

Bill a progress draw and take the payment

Invoices → + New Invoice (or the + Invoice button right on the job). Pick the job and JobsBooks shows you a line worth reading:

Contract $64,500 · Already invoiced $19,350 · Left to bill $45,150

Add a line like "Progress draw #2 — slab and pavers complete (35%)" with the amount, set a due date, save. Hit 👁 to see the printable invoice with your company details and license number, then 🖨 Print / PDF to send it.

When the check comes in: $ Pay on the invoice row, enter the amount and method (Check #2211, Zelle, ACH). Partial payments are fine — the balance keeps tracking, and overdue invoices flag themselves in red.

Read the job: budget, margin, and whether you're behind

Open any job. The dark header gives you the whole story at a glance: contract (with change orders), budget, cost to date, invoiced, collected, and estimated profit with margin %.

Below it, Budget vs. Actual by Cost Code — every code with its budget, actual, remaining, and a bar. Green remaining is good. Red means you're over on that code, and you can see it while there's still time to do something about it, not at the end of the job.

The three reports

And the Dashboard puts the urgent stuff up front: active job margins, open A/R, and an ⚠ Over Budget panel listing exactly which job and which cost code blew past its number.

Turn on the books

Everything so far is job costing. Two clicks turn it into real double-entry accounting.

General Ledger → enter your opening cash balance (what's in the bank as of the day you're starting) → then hit ⟳ Sync Records to Books. Every invoice, payment, and cost you've entered gets posted to a proper journal. It's safe to run again anytime.

From then on it's automatic — an invoice posts to Revenue and A/R, a payment moves A/R to Cash, a cost hits the right job-cost account against Cash, Credit Card, or A/P. You now have:

• Income Statement — revenue, direct job costs, gross profit, overhead, net income, any date range;
• Balance Sheet — what you own, what you owe, what's yours, with a balance check;
• General Ledger — trial balance and every journal entry behind those numbers.

Put your people on it

Settings → Team & Access → enter their email, pick a role, Invite. Tell them to create an account at jobsbooks.com with that exact email — they land straight in your company.

So your foreman can photograph receipts and log hours all day without ever seeing what you make on the job. And Audit Log records who did what, with their email on every entry.

A normal week, once you're set up

• Daily, from the field: log costs as they happen, photograph the receipt. Fifteen seconds each.
• Friday: log crew hours for the week. Ten minutes.
• Friday: glance at the Dashboard — anything in the ⚠ Over Budget panel is a conversation to have on Monday, not a surprise at the end of the job.
• When a milestone lands: invoice the draw. Check "left to bill" so you never finish a job with money still on the table.
• Month end: mark unpaid bills paid, then print the Income Statement and WIP Schedule for your CPA.
• Anytime: ⌘K finds any job, invoice, customer, or receipt in a couple of keystrokes — and runs actions like "log cost" or "new invoice" directly.