Plumbing job costing software
Know What Every Plumbing Job Actually Made You.
Plumbing job costing means tracking every dollar one job burns — the water heater, the fittings, the second supply-house run, the permit, and the tech’s hours — against what you charged. This app does that from the truck: snap the receipt, clock in on the jobsite, and the job’s real margin is on your phone before you close out the ticket.
Free forever — 3 projects, 50 receipts a month. No credit card.
The bid felt right. The margin wasn’t.
A water heater swap gets quoted off a unit price and a labor guess. Then the second trip for an expansion tank, a permit fee nobody built into the number, and forty-five minutes at the supply house because the old connections were galvanized quietly eat the spread. Most plumbing shops find out at tax time which jobs carried the year and which ones just kept the truck rolling. Job costing per job is how you find out the same week you did the work.
This is the actual app
A real iPhone app, free to start
Job Cost Pro is on the App Store. The free tier is the real product — 3 active jobs, 50 receipts a month, full receipt scanning, no card. That covers a lot of one-truck plumbing shops indefinitely.
Get it on the App StoreNew on the App Store — free tier, no card required.
Built for how plumbing jobs actually spend
Receipts land on the right job
Snap the supply-house ticket in the parking lot. The receipt scanner reads the line items and files it on the job — the water heater lands on the swap it was bought for, not a pile called "materials" you’ll be sorting through in April.
Supply runs and tech hours hit the job
Techs clock in with GPS from the jobsite, and the supply-house receipt for the copper, PEX, and fittings gets snapped and logged to the job it went into — so materials and labor stop being a Sunday-night reconstruction from memory.
Margin per job, while it’s running
Every receipt and clock-in updates the job’s live margin. A rough-in trending under water shows up while there’s still time to bill the change order, not three weeks after the trim-out is done and paid.
Free forever — 3 projects, 50 receipts a month. No credit card.
What you get
Receipt scanning
Line items, returns, and faded thermal paper from the supply house — read and filed to the right job.
GPS crew time clock
Clock-in tied to the jobsite. Hours flow to that job’s labor cost automatically.
Live job margin
Charged minus spent, per job, updated the moment a cost lands.
Invoicing from the truck
Build and send the invoice on-site; track what’s paid against what the job cost.
Material returns handled
The returned water heater or unused fitting box nets against the original receipt on the same job — correct cost, not double-counted.
Voice capture
Hands wet under a sink? Say the amount, vendor, and job — it’s logged.
Tax package export
P&L by job, 1099 summary, and every receipt image in one download at year end.
QuickBooks export
Clean CSV/IIF out to your books. QuickBooks stays your accountant’s system; this fills it.
What a plumbing job actually costs
Plumbing carries cost buckets other trades don’t deal with the same way. Fixtures and equipment — the water heater, the disposal, the toilet — are usually your biggest single line and their prices move with copper and steel markets more than any bid sheet accounts for. Rough materials — copper, PEX, fittings, valves, solder — swing week to week and get pulled straight off the truck, which means they rarely get written down at all. Then there’s the permit, the inspection trip, and labor: often one tech on a service call, two on a rough-in, at different real loaded costs, plus the drive time nobody bills.
Job costing is nothing fancier than putting every one of those dollars on the job that caused them, the day they happen. The reason it rarely gets done is friction: the receipt is under the truck seat, the fittings came off a bulk stock nobody tracks per-job, and the bookkeeping is a job for a rainy day that never comes. Kill the friction and the numbers keep themselves.
Run the math on a typical water heater swap
Say you quote a 50-gallon water heater replacement at $2,400. The unit itself runs $1,050. Copper, fittings, a new expansion tank, and a drain pan: $180. Permit and the inspection trip: $95. One tech, five hours at a true loaded cost of $34/hour: $170. Now add the second supply-house run because the old shutoff valve was seized and needed a part nobody stocks — call it $45 in parts and forty-five minutes of drive time, roughly $26 more in labor. Total cost: $1,566. Real margin: $834, about 35%.
Now let that $45 parts run and the $95 permit slip through untracked, and your books say 41% while the truth says 35. Multiply that six-point gap across sixty water heater jobs a year and you are pricing next year’s bids off a number that was never real. That is the whole case for job costing on plumbing work — not paperwork, pricing.
Service calls, bid work, and warranty callbacks are different animals
A service call is volume: a small ticket where the win is capturing the parts receipt and the hour without ceremony. Bid work — a rough-in, a repipe, a full bathroom remodel — is a project job: a quoted price, a real cost stack, a margin worth watching daily from rough-in through trim-out. Warranty callbacks are the quiet margin killer nobody job-costs at all — a callback on a job you already closed still burns parts and an hour, and if it isn’t logged against that original job, it just looks like this month got worse for no reason.
What this app is not: flat-rate price books, load calcs, dispatch boards, or estimating software. Plenty of tools do that job well. This one answers the question none of them answer — what did the job actually cost, and what did you actually keep, once the callback and the second supply-house run are counted in.
Free tier first. Paid when you scale.
Free covers 3 active jobs and 50 receipts a month with full receipt scanning — a real one-truck workload. Pro is $29.99/month when you need more. No card to start, no demo call, no contract.
Simple pricing
Less than a single trip to Home Depot.
Start free. Upgrade when you're ready.
Free
3 projects, 50 receipts/month — get started free
- 3 projects
- 50 receipts/month
- AI receipt scanning
- Voice capture
- 1 tax export/year
- Basic reports
Pro
For solo contractors — unlimited projects & receipts
- Unlimited projects
- Unlimited receipts
- AI chat assistant
- Budget alerts
- Client portal
- Invoice sending
- All exports (tax, CSV, PDF)
- Priority AI processing
Contractor
For crews — 5 team members, GPS & payroll
- Unlimited projects
- Unlimited receipts
- Everything in Pro
- 5 team members
- Mileage tracking
- One-tap GPS clock-in/out
- Payroll exports
- Custom branding
Business
Full platform — 15 team members, 1099s, API
- Unlimited projects
- Unlimited receipts
- Everything in Contractor
- 15 team members
- 1099 automation
- Dedicated support
- API access
- Custom integrations
Paid plans renew automatically at the price shown for the selected interval (monthly or yearly) until you cancel. You'll be charged in US dollars plus any applicable sales tax.
Cancel anytime in Settings → Billing — no refunds for past billing periods. Refund Policy · Terms
Who built this
Chris Sibley — remodeling contractor, Fort Worth, TX
Chris closed a $42,000 bathroom remodel thinking he’d made 30%. His accountant ran the real numbers months later: 12% — $7,500 in receipts never made it onto the job. He built Job Cost Pro so that never happens again, and still runs his remodeling company with it every day. That company is the legal entity behind this app: Salvation Home Remodeling LLC, doing business as Job Cost Pro.
FAQ
What is plumbing job costing software?
Software that tracks every cost one plumbing job creates — fixtures, rough materials, permits, and tech hours — against what you charged for it, so you know the real margin per job instead of one blended number at year end.
How is this different from plumbing estimating software?
Estimating software helps you price the job before you win it. Job costing tracks what the job actually costs after you win it. This app is the after side — many shops run it alongside an estimating tool and compare the quote to reality on every job.
Does job costing work for service plumbing, not just bid jobs?
Yes. A service call is just a small job with one receipt and one clock-in — no ceremony required. The month-end view then shows you honestly whether service calls or bid work carried the month.
How do plumbers track job costs from the field without a spreadsheet?
Snap the supply-house receipt with the phone and it files to the job. Clock in with GPS from the jobsite and the hours land on that job’s labor cost. No end-of-day data entry, no spreadsheet to remember to open.
What should a plumbing job cost actually include?
The fixture or equipment, every material pulled off the truck, the permit and inspection trip, tech hours at their real loaded rate, and any warranty callback tied back to the original job. Leave any one of those out and the margin number is fiction.
Does it do dispatch or flat-rate pricing?
No, and honestly: if scheduling and dispatch boards are the priority, look at a field-service platform. This app does the money side — job costs, receipts, crew hours, invoices, and real margins.
Related
No credit card. No demo. No contract.
The next water heater swap
with a real number on it.
Start freeFree — 3 jobs, 50 receipts a month, receipt scanning included.