Every United States blog post.
Page 1 of 3.
Pricing Jobs to Actually Turn a Profit: A US Contractor's Guide
Plenty of contractors are booked solid year-round and still not much better off at tax season. The gap is almost always in how jobs get bid, not how hard the work gets done. Here's how to price a job so the margin survives real-world conditions.
Read the postTax Deductions US Contractors Forget to Claim
Not every deductible expense is obvious. A few categories get missed year after year — not because contractors don't spend the money, but because it never gets logged as a business cost in the first place.
Read moreWhat to Do When a Job Is Running Over Budget
Every contractor has one — the job that quietly goes sideways. What separates a bad week from a genuinely lost job is usually how early it gets noticed, and what happens next.
Read moreWhat to Do When a Customer Asks to See Your Receipts Before Paying
On a cost-plus or time-and-materials job, a customer asking to see the receipts before they pay isn't an insult — it's a reasonable check on an invoice they can't otherwise verify. How you answer says more about the relationship than the number on the invoice does.
Read moreHow to Split One Receipt Across Two Jobs Without Messing Up Either Total
Buy materials for two jobs in one merchant run and you're left with a single receipt that, tagged whole to either job, quietly lies about both of them. Here's how to split it properly instead of picking one job to absorb the whole cost.
Read moreTracking Job Costs When a Customer Supplies Some of Their Own Materials
A customer who wants to supply their own tiles, fittings or fixtures isn't unusual — but it creates a job cost picture with a hole in it if the only things tracked are the ones you personally paid for.
Read moreDay Rate vs Fixed Price: Which One Actually Tracks Easier
Plenty gets written about which pricing model earns more. Less gets said about which one actually makes it possible to see, mid-job, whether things are on track — which matters just as much, since a pricing model you can't monitor is one you can only judge after it's too late to fix anything.
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