Job Costing Software
By Phazahn Odom | Founder of Phixmo | Former bookkeeper for residential GCs | Former NFL tight end, Pittsburgh Steelers
The number one thing I saw doing books for residential GCs was contractors who didn't know they lost money on a job until reconciliation. By then it's too late. The framing ran 40 hours over, the drywall cost $3,000 more than estimated, and three change orders never got billed. Total damage: $8,000 in margin that's gone forever.
Phixmo tracks costs against the budget in real time, by category, on every project. You see the bleed while there's still time to stop it.
Real-time job costing is a live budget-vs-actual view, by category, on every active project. Data flows in from time tracking, receipts, and subcontractor invoices, and the AI flags anything trending hot before the overrun finishes.
Estimated cost vs actual spend broken down by labor, materials, subs, equipment, and miscellaneous. Each category shows estimated, spent, remaining, and percent consumed. You see which category is bleeding at a glance without opening a spreadsheet.
Field workers clock in and labor flows into the labor category against the right project. Receipts get submitted from the field and AI parses them into materials. Subcontractor invoices feed into subs. The categories fill themselves as the job runs.
AI watches your project budgets nightly and flags anything trending hot. Framing at 65% spent with only 40% of the work done. Materials projected to come in 18% over estimate. You get the alert before the overrun is done, while there's still room to negotiate or adjust scope.
Type "how much have we spent on labor for the Highway 300 ADU?" or "which project is most over budget right now?" and get an immediate answer from your live data. No report builder, no exports, no formulas.
Five recurring leaks I saw over and over closing books for residential contractors. They show up on almost every job, and they're all preventable with the right data flow.
You estimated 80 hours of framing and the crew took 120. Nobody compared estimated vs actual hours until the job is done. By then you're paying for 40 hours you didn't bid. Software should be telling you on day 3 that framing is trending long, not on day 30 when the work is finished.
Homeowner asks for an extra outlet. Crew does it. Nobody writes it up. That's $400 gone. Multiply by 10 to 15 small requests across a $200k project and you've lost $4,000 to $6,000 in change order revenue that was rightfully yours.
A crew lead grabs $350 of material at the supply house on the way to the jobsite. The receipt sits in the truck. Two weeks later nobody knows which project to bill it to. Either you eat the cost, or you guess. Either way you're losing money.
Labor gets charged to materials. Subcontractor invoices get logged as miscellaneous. By the time you're closing the books, you can't tell if labor was on budget or way over because the numbers are scrambled.
Most contractors find out the actual cost of a job during reconciliation, after the project is closed. By then there is nothing to fix. The money is gone. Real-time job costing means the conversation happens during the job, not after.
Phixmo is designed to prevent all five of these.
Spreadsheets work until they don't. Here are the four places they fall apart on residential jobs and how Phixmo handles each one.
A spreadsheet requires someone to type in every cost as it happens. In practice that means receipts sit in trucks for weeks, labor hours don't get logged consistently, and the spreadsheet is always two weeks behind reality. Phixmo captures the data as workers clock in and submit receipts. By the end of the day, your numbers are current.
A spreadsheet sits there and waits to be looked at. If you don't open it for three days, you don't see that framing went 40% over yesterday. Phixmo monitors every project budget nightly and sends an alert the moment a category trends hot.
Spreadsheet for budget. Sticky notes for change orders. Email for invoices. QuickBooks for receipts. Phone calls for change orders. Five tools that don't talk to each other. Phixmo keeps everything in one place: estimate becomes budget, time tracking feeds labor, receipts feed materials, change orders adjust the budget, invoices flow against the totals.
A spreadsheet answers exactly what you formula-built it to answer. Need a new view? Time to rebuild. In Phixmo you type the question in plain English and get the answer instantly. "How much have we spent on subs across all open projects this month?" Answered in two seconds.
Five categories cover almost every cost on a residential job. Each one shows estimated, actual, remaining, and percent consumed. Color-coded so anything trending over jumps out.
Labor
65%
Internal crew + sub labor
Est.
$48,000
Actual
$31,200
Remaining
$16,800
Materials
87%
AI-parsed receipts + POs
Est.
$62,000
Actual
$54,100
Remaining
$7,900
Subcontractors
59%
Plumbing, electrical, HVAC
Est.
$38,000
Actual
$22,400
Remaining
$15,600
Equipment
111%
Rental + owned allocations
Est.
$6,500
Actual
$7,200
Remaining
-$700
Other / misc
44%
Permits, dump fees, fuel
Est.
$4,200
Actual
$1,850
Remaining
$2,350
Internal crew hours flow from time tracking with geofence verification. Subcontractor labor flows from sub invoices. Both roll up into the labor category, but you can see them broken out so you know whether your own crew or your subs are the cost driver.
Receipts from the field get parsed by AI for vendor, amount, and date. Material POs from suppliers get logged with quantities. The material category shows estimated, spent, remaining, and percent consumed.
Sub invoices logged against the project. Phixmo tracks both committed (sub contracts you've signed) and actual (sub work paid for). The difference between committed and spent tells you what you still owe across all subs on the job.
Rental equipment, owned equipment time allocations, and any tool or equipment cost specific to the project. Separated so equipment doesn't get hidden inside materials.
Permits, dump fees, parking, fuel, and anything that doesn't fit cleanly in the four primary categories. Tracked separately so misc doesn't quietly become the dumping ground that hides real cost overruns elsewhere.
Job costing isn't a standalone module. It pulls data from every other part of Phixmo automatically, which is what makes the numbers actually accurate.
Your estimate is your initial budget. When the customer signs the contract, the estimate gets locked in as the baseline. Job costing measures actual spend against that baseline category by category.
Workers clock in with GPS, and the hours flow directly into the labor category for the right project. No timesheets, no manual entry, no end-of-week reconciliation.
Field workers snap photos of receipts. AI extracts the vendor, amount, and date, and maps the receipt to the project the worker is currently clocked into. The materials category updates automatically.
When a change order is approved, the new revenue and any added cost flow directly into the project's budget. The budget vs actual view always reflects the current scope, not the original estimate.
Invoices sent through Phixmo flow against the contract value, so you can see at any point how much of the contract has been billed, how much is collected, and how much is outstanding. Margin views combine cost data and revenue data without you doing math.
The project dashboard rolls up budget, actual, change orders, invoiced, and collected for every active project. One screen, real numbers, no exports.
Job costing is included on every Phixmo plan. The tier you pick depends on the number of office seats (owners, PMs, supervisors, admins) you need. Field workers are always free.
Free
$0/mo
Free forever. Unlimited projects, field workers free.
2 office seats
+ unlimited free field workers
Pro
$169/mo
Growing GCs with active teams.
5 office seats
+ unlimited free field workers
Growth
$299/mo
Larger operations.
10 office seats + $25/extra
+ unlimited free field workers
No. Phixmo ships with the cost categories residential GCs actually use (labor, materials, subcontractors, equipment, and miscellaneous) configured out of the box. You can rename them, add subcategories, or build custom cost codes if you want a deeper structure, but most contractors don't need to.
Yes. Each project has a billing type that adjusts how costs and revenue are tracked. Fixed-price projects measure actual cost against the contract value to compute margin. Time and materials projects track billable hours and reimbursable materials against the rate sheet so you can invoice cleanly without doing the math by hand.
Phixmo flags it visually on the project dashboard and surfaces it in the budget anomaly alert that goes out nightly. You can drill into the category that's trending hot, see which specific cost entries are driving it, and decide whether to absorb, negotiate with the homeowner via a change order, or adjust scope. The system doesn't stop work or hide the problem. It surfaces it while you still have time to react.
Coming soon. Two-way QuickBooks Online sync is the next major integration on the roadmap. In the meantime you can export expenses, invoices, and time data for manual import.
By default, Phixmo tracks at the category level (labor, materials, subs, equipment, misc) which is the right level for most residential remodelers and ADU builders. If you run jobs that need finer detail, you can add subcategories or full cost codes (e.g., framing labor vs finish labor inside the labor category) and the dashboard rolls up accordingly. You decide how granular based on your business, not the software.