The numbers every electrical contractor should watch

An electrical shop isn’t one business, it’s two stitched together. There’s the service side: troubleshoot a dead circuit, swap a breaker, hang a few fixtures, in and out the same day. And there’s the project side: a panel upgrade, a remodel rough-in, new construction, a commercial fit-out (wiring out a tenant’s raw space) that runs for weeks. Those two halves earn money in completely different ways, and most of the numbers that matter are about telling them apart, and catching where profit leaks out between them.

Five numbers do that work. Read them as a story rather than a scorecard, because the sharp ones only make sense when two systems are set side by side. Your field-service software, Jobber or Housecall Pro, holds jobs, scheduling, labor and revenue. Your accounting, QuickBooks, holds materials, invoices and the cash. The hard questions sit in the gap between them.

1. Revenue mix: service vs. projects

Start with the split between short service calls and longer projects, because it’s your best leading indicator and few shops track it. Service work is steady, fast-turning cash with predictable margins. Project work is lumpy: bigger tickets, but heavy on materials and labor, paid slower, and far easier to lose money on. When the mix tilts hard toward projects, revenue can look great while your bank balance gets tight, because cash is tied up in work you’ve done but haven’t been paid for. Watch the ratio move: when projects climb from a third of the month to two-thirds, that shift tells you what’s coming before the P&L does.

It lives in job types and revenue inside Jobber or Housecall Pro, but only if jobs are tagged service versus project so the split is something you can actually see.

2. Gross margin per project, not average ticket

On the service side, average ticket is a fine gut-check. On the project side it’s nearly useless: a $40,000 fit-out and a $40,000 money-loser carry the identical ticket. What you need is margin per project, revenue minus its real cost (materials, labor, any subs), and that means comparing what you estimated to what actually happened. Estimated 60 labor hours, burned 95? Bid the wire and gear at last quarter’s prices, then took a copper spike to the chin? That’s where a healthy-looking project quietly turns into a break-even one. Job costing, lining up a job’s real labor and material cost against what you billed, is the single most important habit on the project side.

This one is split, which is exactly why it’s hard: labor hours sit in Jobber or Housecall Pro, material costs and the invoice sit in QuickBooks, and neither tool shows margin per project on its own. You have to read them together.

3. Change orders that never got billed

Scope gets added to a project after the bid all the time: extra circuits, a panel the GC (general contractor) decided to relocate, a finish upgrade. This is the quietest margin killer in the trade. On a fast-moving job site your crew does the extra work because that’s the job, and the paperwork to bill for it never catches up. Every unbilled change is labor and material you bought and gave away. Even $300 of it per project, across a year of jobs, is real money walking out the door.

The tell is a project where billed barely moved off the bid while logged hours ballooned, which you only see by setting the original estimate in QuickBooks against the work logged in your field-service software. We won’t pretend a report writes the change order for you. It can only surface the ones the paperwork missed while there’s still time to bill them.

4. AR aging on net-30 and net-60 work

Residential service customers usually pay on the spot. Commercial and GC work is different: you finish the job, send the invoice, and then wait, often on net-30 or net-60 terms (payment due 30 or 60 days after invoicing). Run enough of that and a large chunk of your cash sits parked in accounts receivable, money you’ve earned but haven’t collected, where one slow-paying builder on a big project can squeeze a shop that’s profitable on paper. The older a balance gets, the harder it is to collect, so the fix is a steady rhythm, not a quarterly panic. Here’s a simple system for overdue invoices.

It lives in invoices, balances and due dates in QuickBooks, best read grouped by how late each balance is rather than as one AR total.

5. Callbacks and failed inspections

A callback is margin you already earned, spent twice. In electrical the sting is sharper because so many return trips trace to a code issue or a failed inspection: the inspector flags it, the crew goes back, and you’re paying labor (and sometimes a re-inspection fee) on a job you’d already closed. A rising callback rate, or one tech failing inspections twice as often as the rest of the crew, is both a margin problem and a quality signal worth catching early.

It lives in job records in Jobber or Housecall Pro. Look for callback or redo flags, and tag the ones tied to a failed inspection so the pattern is visible instead of buried.

Why none of this shows up in one report

Run back through the five: revenue mix, margin per project, unbilled change orders, net-30 aging, callbacks. Each one needs Jobber or Housecall Pro and QuickBooks read against each other, and unbilled changes only surface when you set the estimate beside the final invoice. None of it lives in one place. You don’t need a BI tool or an analyst to close that gap; you need the two systems read together, on a fixed rhythm.

That is why Guidepost exists. It reads Jobber or Housecall Pro, QuickBooks, and your ad platforms together and sends a short, plain-English digest of the few things worth your attention this week, each with its next step and its source. When a net-30 invoice crosses 60 days, it says so plainly. When the honest answer is “look closer,” like a noisy week of lead spend, it shows you the number and leaves the decision with you.

If you’d rather have that gap watched than keep straddling it by hand, get early access.