Job Profitability Reporting in Simpro: From Raw Data to Real Margins

Ask most business owners what margin they make on a typical job and you'll get a confident answer. Build accurate job profitability reporting from their Simpro data, and that answer often changes — sometimes dramatically. Here's how to get to the real number.

Why "gut feel" margins are usually wrong

Headline margin (price minus obvious cost) ignores the costs that quietly eat profit: unbilled hours, materials that weren't recovered, rework, and overhead. Until those are captured per job, you're estimating, not measuring.

The ingredients of true job margin

Accurate profitability reporting pulls together several streams of Simpro data:

• Labour — all hours booked to the job, costed at the right rate, including overtime.
• Materials — purchase orders and stock issued, including what wasn't passed on to the customer.
• Subcontractors — committed and actual costs.
• Revenue — quoted, variations and actually invoiced amounts.
• Overhead allocation — a fair share of indirect cost, if you want fully-loaded margin.

Budget vs actual, in real time

The most valuable version of this report compares budget to actual as the job progresses, not just at the end. Spotting a job tracking over budget at 40% complete gives you time to act. Discovering it at invoicing gives you a lesson.

Slice it the ways that matter

Once you have clean job margin, the insights multiply. Look at margin by customer (are your biggest clients your most profitable?), by job type, by technician, and by site. Patterns emerge that reshape how you quote and who you chase.

Why this is hard in native Simpro reports

Pulling all of this together usually means combining several Simpro reports — and often accounting data too. That's slow and error-prone by hand, which is why job profitability is one of the first things businesses move into Power BI. See our complete guide to Simpro reporting for the broader approach and how to connect Simpro to Power BI for the plumbing.

Make it visible

A profitability report that lives in someone's inbox once a month won't change behaviour. Put it on a dashboard the team sees daily — building a Simpro dashboard in Power BI shows how. And if you want it built and reconciled with your accounts, our Simpro reporting and Simpro dashboard services are designed for exactly this.