Job Costing
A bill gets entered against a job. This agent picks it up, rolls it in with the labor, materials, and sub costs already on that job, and lines the total up against the budget for that cost code. When a job crosses the variance threshold you set, it flags it and attaches the transactions behind the number. It never edits your books. Every figure it reports is one you can run yourself and check.
Yours outright — no required subscription.
Every agent is built for your business — your systems, your approval chain, your way of working. We scope it on the call.
If this sounds too technical, don't worry. We take care of everything for you.
- Private VPS deployment. This agent runs on a server that belongs to you, not a shared cloud tenant. Job margin is compensation-adjacent data in a small company, and it stays on your box.
- A technician agent alongside it. Every hire ships as a pair: the Job Costing Agent doing the rollup, and a VPS-technician agent on the same box keeping it patched, backed up, and monitored. You're not hiring one thing, you're hiring a small team of two.
- Connection to where the cost data already lives. Wired into your accounting system's job records, your time data, and the project tool where budgets sit if you run one. Your estimate becomes the baseline it compares against, loaded once at setup instead of retyped every week.
- Committed cost, not just billed cost. Where your open POs and signed subcontracts are recorded somewhere it can read, it counts them against the budget alongside the bills that have actually landed. If those commitments only exist as PDFs in a folder today, that's a setup conversation on the call, not a promise made in advance.
- A weekly summary in plain language. Where each job stands against budget, which ones crossed your threshold, and what's driving the overage, written so it reads on a phone on a Saturday. It goes to the people you name at setup and nobody else.
- 14 days of priority support after launch, which is when your real coding habits show up and the thresholds get tuned to them.
- You own everything — the server, the agent, the code it runs on.
Not sure it fits? Check fit in 90 seconds in the free assessment chat.
Who this is for
- You're running 8 to 25 active jobs and the only place budget-versus-actual exists is a spreadsheet your bookkeeper rebuilds every Friday from an accounting export pasted next to estimate columns typed in months ago.
- You found out a job lost money at closeout. It was bid at eighteen points and came in at four, and nobody can point to the week it turned, because the cost data was three weeks behind the whole time.
- Your accounting system shows what's been billed to you, not what you've committed. Signed subcontracts and open POs sit in a folder of PDFs, so a job reads 62% spent when it's already 91% spoken for.
- You're an agency or a clinic rather than a contractor: the fee is fixed, hours live in one system, contractor and pass-through costs live in bills, and nobody assembles the two until someone gets nervous enough to ask.
How it earns trust
The failure mode of AI in job costing isn't that it gets a number wrong — a hand-built spreadsheet gets numbers wrong every week. It's that you can't tell which number, or when it started. This agent is built around the opposite bet: nothing it reports is a bare total.
Every number opens
When it says a cost code is 40% over on a job, the flag carries the line items underneath it: vendor, date, amount, document number, the cost code it was coded to, and which source it came from — a bill, a timesheet batch, a card charge, an open PO.
The summary is reproducible
Re-run it against last week's snapshot and you get last week's numbers, with every changed line showing what moved and which transaction moved it. Threshold evaluations are stamped too — which rule fired, on which job, against which budget version, as of what date — so a flag that later looks wrong can be traced to a stale budget or a late bill instead of argued about.
The first month is a reconciliation
Your bookkeeper keeps building the spreadsheet by hand while the agent runs beside it, and you compare the two. Every place they diverge is either a bug in the agent or a coding problem you didn't know you had. Both are worth finding, and you'll know which you've got before you rely on it.
Because the agent writes nothing back, your accounting system stays the control: any figure it reports can be verified by running the same report by hand, and if the two disagree, the agent is wrong, not your books.
Pairs well with
These share a workflow with this role. Tick any to add them to your setup.
Our numbers are always two or three weeks behind. Does this make them current?
It makes them as current as your books are. Costs land when the bill is entered, not when the work happened, so a sub who invoices 45 days late will still make a job look healthy in month two and alarming in month three. What changes is the lag between a cost hitting your system and you seeing it against budget — that goes from a weekly rebuild to as soon as the transaction is there.
The guys aren't coding their time to the right job. Will it catch that?
Sometimes, and never reliably. If a big invoice was coded to Maple Street instead of Maple Court, the rollup faithfully reports the wrong job. It can flag a pattern that looks off — a vendor that only ever bills one job suddenly hitting another — but it cannot know where the truck actually was. Miscoding is the biggest source of bad job cost data and this does not fix it at the source.
What counts as a job running hot?
You set the threshold, a percent-of-budget or a dollar variance, and it flags what crosses it with the line items driving the number. Two honest limits. It compares cost against whatever budget baseline it can read, so a job that legitimately grew by a signed change order will flag until someone updates the budget line. And it cannot judge percent complete — 78% of budget spent is only an overrun if a human knows the work is half done. Its flags are about spend velocity unless a PM supplies progress.
What won't it do?
It never edits your books. No recoding a transaction, no reclassifying an expense, no changing a cost code, no adjusting a budget line — a suspected miscoding gets flagged with the detail attached, for a human to fix in the system of record. It never touches billing: no client invoices, no draw requests, no change orders, no retainage releases, no sub payments. It never decides a job is over budget; it reports what crossed your threshold, and whether to stop work, eat it, or write a change order stays with you. And it never sends job margin outside the recipient list you set.
What happens on the 15-minute call?
It's the interview, not a pitch. We walk through how your jobs are set up, where budgets live today, who currently builds the Friday spreadsheet, and who should be allowed to see job margin. Your labor burden multiplier gets set there too — it's an assumption applied the same way to every job, so if it's off, it's off everywhere at once rather than in one spot you'd notice. You'll leave knowing what gets built and when, and it's typically live in about seven days from kickoff.
What's covered under the $1,997 setup, and what isn't?
One company, one system of record for job costs, one approval chain. If you run separate books per entity, or a second cost structure that doesn't map to the first, that's a scoped conversation rather than a price adjustment. You own the server, the code, and the keys when it's done; we keep the recipe we used to cook it.
Hiring more than one? A department on tap — the subscription puts a build team behind every request, agent after agent.