Track your profit on a job
Say how the job pays and profit tracks itself as costs land.
FIRST THE BUDGET TAB ASKS HOW THE JOB PAYS YOU. Three answers: COST-PLUS (you bill what it costs plus a percentage - the markup is your pay), FIXED PRICE (one agreed number, and you keep whatever is left after costs), or BUILDING TO SELL (no client - revenue is the sale price). You answer once and the screen settles.
WHY IT ASKS. Before this it showed a "what are you charging for this job?" box and a markup box at the same time, with "leave it empty on cost-plus" underneath - because it did not know which kind of job it was and was leaving you to work it out. On a cost-plus custom home that box is asking a question the job has no answer to. Billing method (simple or AIA) does not tell it either: that is how you INVOICE, not how you are PAID.
ON COST-PLUS the screen tracks your markup, and there is no contract-value box at all. Your fee is the profit: the panel shows the markup across the whole budget, and once costs land, the fee actually EARNED. That earned figure is worked out invoice by invoice, so anything you billed at cost or gave its own percent is respected - it is not the rate multiplied by your spend. It is the same number the Billing the client tab reports, from the same calculation.
ON FIXED PRICE OR BUILDING TO SELL it asks for the figure instead - your CONTRACT VALUE on a job with a client, the SELLOUT on one you are building to sell. Profit is that less what the job is budgeted to cost, and once costs land, against what has actually been spent.
PROFIT IS ONLY EVER SHOWN AGAINST A FIGURE YOU ACTUALLY GAVE IT. It used to fall back to cost plus your markup and print that as "projected profit", so a job whose price nobody had entered still showed a confident green number the app had invented. If the figure is missing the panel does not draw at all.
It stays on the screen at every stage, not just while planning. "Am I still making money on this" is the question you ask MOST once work has started, and the "against actual spend" figure only means anything once costs have landed.
- 1Open the project and go to the Budget tab.
- 2Answer "How does this job pay you?" - once per job.
- 3Cost-plus: set your markup percent. Fixed price or building to sell: enter the contract value or sale price.
- 4Projected profit and margin appear next to it, and profit against actual spend once costs start landing.
THE RATE AND THE CONTRACT VALUE DO NOT SIT LIVE. They read as plain text with a small pencil beside them - click it to edit, tick to confirm, Escape to abandon. Nothing is saved just because you clicked away mid-edit. These decide what a client is billed, and the Budget tab is a screen people scroll through to read far more often than to change anything.
Change the answer any time in Edit project. If you mostly do one kind of work, set it once in Settings → Company and new jobs start there.
MARKUP is the rate, and on a cost-plus job it is the default rather than the last word. Any single invoice can be billed at cost or given its own percent on the Bills from subs tab - a permit fee or a pass-through does not have to follow the job rate. That is set per invoice on purpose: you mark up a real cost, not a budget line, because a budget line is a forecast and nobody bills a forecast.
Before a job is won the markup also drives the client price on your proposal. On a cost-plus job that estimate bar reads the rate you set above rather than offering a second box writing the same field.
On a multi-unit site, set the figure on each unit. The site's Jobs tab then totals it against total cost and shows the projected profit for the whole building, with the margin. Units you have not priced yet are marked, and the total says "partial" so you know the number is not final.
This is deliberately just revenue minus cost. SyteNav does not model land acquisition, a loan or equity stack, draw schedules, or an exit - if you run a full development pro-forma, keep doing that in your own model and use this to keep the construction side honest.