Why do most service business owners not know their actual margin per job?
Genuinely curious about this because I keep running into it talking to contractors, landscapers, cleaners, and other service operators.
Most of them know their total revenue. A lot of them know their biggest costs in general. But almost none of them can tell you whether a specific job made money after labor, materials, drive time, equipment, and overhead.
When I ask why, I keep hearing the same things:
"QuickBooks doesn't show me that." It tracks transactions but not per-job profitability without a complicated setup most people skip.
"I have a spreadsheet but it's always out of date." Building and maintaining a job costing model is more work than most operators have time for.
"I kind of know which jobs are good." But when I push on it, they're usually going by feel, not numbers. And they can't tell you by how much.
"My data is in three different places." Invoicing tool, accounting software, payroll system. Combining them is a project.
Is this a common experience here? How are people actually handling job-level profitability tracking? Spreadsheet, software, gut feel, something else?