Learning goals

Explain why a small contractor needs job-level numbers, not just a bank balance
Name the four journals and the four report sheets and say what flows where
Find the case period, the report date, and the ground rules in Settings and Read Me

Concepts

Why job costing at all

Ridgeline Remodels LLC is a six-person residential remodeler in Oregon: Dana Whitfield (owner and project lead), Marcus Reed (lead carpenter), Sofia Nguyen (carpenter), Tyler Brooks (apprentice), Jamal Wright (laborer), and Priya Patel (office and bookkeeping). At the end of June 2026 the checking account looks healthy, and that is exactly the problem: cash can hide a losing job for months.

Job costing splits every dollar of revenue and cost by project, so by the end of this course you can answer three questions Dana asks every month: Which jobs actually made money? Is the overhead of running the office being paid for? And are we billing faster than we spend?

The same skeleton works beyond construction. An agency or consultancy reads jobs as client engagements, cost codes as service lines, and draws as monthly invoices - the formulas do not change.

💡 Tips:

If you can only see company-level profit, every job looks fine until one of them quietly eats the year.

The tour: thirteen sheets, one direction of flow

The workbook has three layers, and data only ever flows downhill.

Master data (type here first): Jobs, Cost Codes, and Employees. Every transaction points back at these three lists by code.

Journals (type here daily): Estimates, Timesheets, Cost Log, and Billings. Each row carries one job number and one cost code - that is the whole trick. Nothing else in the workbook is typed by hand.

Reports (never type here): Overhead, WIP, Job P&L, and Utilization. They read the journals with SUMIF, SUMIFS, and VLOOKUP and rebuild themselves every time a number changes.

Read Me and Settings hold the ground rules and the model parameters, so start there whenever a number looks surprising.

Conventions you can rely on

Every sheet uses the same canvas: the sheet title sits at B2, column headers sit on row 4, and data starts on row 5. Cells with a pale green background are formulas - admire them, retype them when a lesson asks, but never paste over them.

Amounts are US dollars shown as $1,234.00 and exclude sales tax (construction taxability varies by state; the Read Me sheet points you to your state Department of Revenue). Dates display as Mar 5, 2026. Invoicing follows NET 30 terms, which you will compute by formula in Lesson 10.

The workbook intentionally contains no macros of any kind - it is plain formulas, so it opens in Excel, Google Sheets, or LibreOffice without a security prompt.

Practice

Fixed case (Mar 1 – Jun 30, 2026). This tour has nothing to retype - click, read, and get your bearings.

Land on Read Me — The exercise opens on the Read Me sheet. Skim the twelve rows: workflow, entry rules, the sales-tax note, and the W-9 note for subcontractors.
Check the Settings sheet — Click the Settings tab. Confirm C5 Period start Mar 1, 2026, C6 Period end Jun 30, 2026, and C7 Report date Jun 30, 2026 - every date-sensitive formula in the workbook points at these three cells.
Walk the journals — Open Estimates, Timesheets, Cost Log, and Billings in order. Notice that every row carries a Job # (like J-2601) and, where it makes sense, a Cost Code (like 2200).
Peek at the reports — Open WIP and Job P&L. Everything on them is pale green - formulas only. Row 8 of WIP already knows the company totals: costs to date of $108,655.00 against estimates of $132,300.00.

Online exercise

The spreadsheet below is editable — follow the practice steps right on this page. Steps that need ribbon menus should be done in your own Excel with the downloadable practice file.

表格加载中…

Checklist

Work through each item; when every box passes, this lesson is done:

☐ Named the four journals (Estimates, Timesheets, Cost Log, Billings) and the four report sheets (Overhead, WIP, Job P&L, Utilization)
☐ Confirmed Settings pins the period at Mar 1, 2026 through Jun 30, 2026 with a report date of Jun 30, 2026
☐ Found the sales-tax note and the W-9 note on the Read Me sheet
☐ Saw that WIP row 8 shows $108,655.00 of direct costs to date on $132,300.00 of won estimates

🏗️ Lesson 01 · One workbook, six steps: how job costing fits together