A full diary is not the same as a profitable one. If you are working six days and still tight at month end, the answer is in the jobs — you just cannot see it yet.
3 September 2026 · 6 min read
This is the most common complaint in the trades and the least often diagnosed, because diagnosing it means knowing what each job cost you — and almost nobody does. Here is where the money usually goes, roughly in order of how much damage each one does.
Not all your work is equally profitable, and averages hide disasters. A single badly quoted job can eat the profit from three good ones, and if you only ever look at the bank balance you will never know which one it was. This is the big one, and it is invisible without per-job figures.
Site visits, quoting, merchant runs, the phone calls, the trip back for the forgotten part. None of it is on an invoice and all of it is your week. You cannot bill every hour of it, but you can price it into your rates — which means knowing roughly how many hours a week it actually takes.
Rates have a way of staying put while materials, fuel, insurance and van costs do not. If you have not touched your figure in two or three years you are almost certainly working for less than you were. The hourly rate calculator starts from what you need to earn and works backwards, which is the right direction.
Sometimes there is no profitability problem at all — the profit exists, it is just sitting in other people’s accounts. If you do not know your outstanding total off the top of your head, find out before you conclude you are underpricing. Chasing late payments fixes a cash problem that can look identical to a pricing problem.
Every receipt that never makes it out of the footwell is money you have spent and will not get relief on. It is not the biggest item on this list, but it is the easiest to fix — see the expenses tradespeople forget to claim.
You need each job to carry its own labour and materials. Run jobs live rather than reconstructing them: start the job, text materials as you buy them, end it when you leave. Then the numbers exist. On GraftG you can ask for a tax-year-to-date picture of income against expenses with a single message (PROFIT), and pull the detail out as an accountant-ready export when you want to go deeper — the customers and profit guide covers it. Three months of honest per-job figures usually makes the culprit obvious.
Once you can see it, act on it: raise the rate, drop the job type that never pays, stop quoting for the customer who always haggles. Most tradespeople know which category of work is the problem long before they have the figures — the figures just give you permission.
Usually one of five things: a couple of jobs that quietly lost money, too many unbilled hours, an hourly rate that has not moved in years, profit sitting in unpaid invoices, or unclaimed expenses. Without per-job figures you cannot tell which, and averages hide the bad jobs.
Record labour time and materials against that specific job rather than in one big pile. Once each job carries its own costs, comparing what you charged with what it cost takes seconds, and the pattern across a few months tells you what to stop quoting for.
Check your outstanding invoices first. If a healthy amount is owed but unpaid, you may be pricing fine and chasing badly, which is a completely different fix from putting your rates up.
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