Most tradespeople don't know what they actually made on a job.

They know what they charged. They don't know what they spent getting there. The difference between those two numbers is profit — and for most contractors, it's a number they've never seen at the job level. We built a screen that shows it. Here's why it matters more than any other number in your business.

The Profit Screen — live in CashWrench

The number most contractors have never seen

Ask a plumber what he made on his last job. He'll tell you what he charged. Ask him what he actually made — after parts, after materials, after the half-roll of PTFE tape and the new washer kit he bought on the way — and he'll pause. Probably for a while.

This isn't a criticism. It's just the reality of how most trade businesses operate. Revenue is visible. Expenses are scattered — some in a shoebox, some on a bank statement, some not recorded at all. The gap between what you charged and what you kept is a number most contractors estimate, at best, and ignore at worst.

That gap is your profit. And it's the only number that actually tells you how your business is doing.

"Charging $580 and making $580 are not the same thing. But for most tradespeople, they've always looked like the same thing."

Why job-level profit changes everything

Most financial software shows you profit at the end of the month. Total revenue minus total expenses equals a number. That number is useful. It's not useful enough.

Because the month-level number hides everything. It doesn't tell you which jobs were profitable and which weren't. It doesn't tell you that the $300 emergency callout on Tuesday was a $40 job once you account for the parts you bought in a rush at full retail price. It doesn't tell you that the $580 bathroom job was actually $505 net because you picked up a new tool set on the way.

Job-level profit does all of that. Every job becomes its own mini business — charged, spent, made. You can see immediately which types of jobs are worth taking and which ones are draining your margin.

Three numbers. That's the whole thing. No spreadsheet, no accountant, no end-of-month reckoning. Just the truth about every job, right there in the app when you're done.

The margin number is the quiet revelation

In the example above — $580 charged, $75 in expenses, $505 profit — the margin is 87.1%. That's a strong job. The parts cost was low relative to the labour, the work was efficient, the margin held.

Now imagine a different job. Emergency callout, customer panicking, you drove 40 minutes, bought parts at the nearest hardware store at retail markup, spent three hours on a job you quoted for two. You charged $380. Parts cost $140. Net profit: $240. Margin: 63%.

Both jobs look the same in a revenue column. They are not the same job. The margin number tells you that immediately — no calculation required, no spreadsheet open, no accountant needed at the end of the month.

Over time, a contractor who knows their margin per job makes fundamentally better business decisions than one who doesn't. They price emergency work differently. They stock common parts to avoid retail markups. They recognise which customer types consistently produce low-margin work. That knowledge compounds.

"The best thing about knowing your profit per job isn't the number itself. It's what you start doing differently once you can see it."

We kept it to one tap — deliberately

We could have built a full expense management module. Categories, receipt photos, tax codes, QuickBooks exports. That's a full product. It's also not what a plumber needs at 4pm on a job site when he just bought a new P-trap kit.

So we didn't build that. We built this instead: open the job, tap Add Job Expense, type the amount, done. No receipt required. No category to choose. No upload to wait for. The number gets attached to the job and the profit recalculates instantly.

The discipline behind keeping it this simple is harder than it sounds. Every product instinct pushes you toward adding one more field, one more option, one more thing that feels useful but becomes friction. We resisted all of it. The result is a feature that tradespeople will actually use — not occasionally, not when they remember, but on every job, because it takes less time than unlocking their phone.

What this looks like across a week

A solo plumber doing 20 jobs a week. Some are labour-only callouts with 90%+ margins. Some are parts-heavy jobs that sit at 65%. Some emergency jobs with retail-priced parts that barely break 55%.

Without job-level profit tracking, all of those look the same. Busy week, lots of invoices, decent revenue. With job-level profit tracking, patterns emerge quickly. Which job types hold margin. Which postcodes involve long drives that erode profitability. Which customers always need parts that eat into the job.

"The best thing about knowing your profit per job isn't the number itself. It's what you start doing differently once you can see it."

It's free for two months. Try it on a real job.

CashWrench is free for two months. No credit card, no contract, no commitment. Sign up, run it on your next job, add the parts you bought, and see the profit number appear.

That moment — the first time you see what you actually made on a job rather than what you charged — is the moment most contractors stop thinking of CashWrench as an invoicing app and start thinking of it as something they can't run their business without.

We'll let the screen do the talking.

— The CashWrench Team

Know your profit. On every single job.

Free for 2 months. Add your first expense in 8 seconds. See your real profit instantly. No credit card, no contracts.