What is Job costing?
Finance & accounting. A plain-English definition for Australian business owners.
Job costing is the practice of tracking actual costs — labour, materials, subcontractors, allocated overhead — against each individual job, project or client engagement.
It answers the question a profit and loss statement cannot: which jobs make money and which quietly lose it. Job costing is essential in trades, construction, professional services and manufacturing, where profitability varies job by job. Done properly it also feeds quoting, because past actuals make future quotes accurate; done poorly, a profitable-looking business can discover too late that its biggest jobs were its least profitable.
In a connected back office this sits with the Finance hub, where Valont runs bookkeeping, managed payroll and bas & tax compliance for Australian SMEs as one team. The full definition set is on the glossary.
Talk to an Advisor
General information, not advice. For how this applies to your business, talk it through with a Trusted Advisor or start with the Business Health Check.