Countertop job costing template: the worksheet every shop should run.

Quote vs. actual: where the money hides

Every shop knows what it charged. Few can say, with confidence, what the job cost. The quote lives in a document; the actuals live in memory, a stack of invoices, and half-remembered hours — and the difference between the two is the difference between a shop that grows and a shop that stays busy.

Job costing is the practice of capturing what a single job consumed while the job is still fresh: the slab and off-cuts, the fabrication hours, the install crew, the tooling, and a fair share of the overhead that keeps the lights on. Our job costing fundamentals article covers why averages mislead and the four numbers to capture per job. This guide is the worksheet itself — the exact fields, in the exact order, so the practice takes ten minutes a week instead of a lost Sunday.

Block 1: the header

The header identifies the job and everything you need to slice the data later. Capture it once, at quote acceptance:

Job ID and customer. A sequential job number you can say out loud on the phone — not the customer's name, which changes when the homeowner is actually the GC.

Quote number and quoted total. This is the number the actuals will be measured against. No quote reference means no variance analysis.

Dates. Sold, templated, fabricated, installed. Four dates, and you can see cycle time per job — one of the more revealing numbers in the shop.

Square footage, material, and thickness. These three let you compare jobs like for like — and spot the material that quietly eats margin at a given price point.

Block 2: the five cost columns

Everything a job consumes falls into five columns. Convert each to dollars before it enters the sheet — hours are a habit, dollars are math.

Material. The slab cost allocated to this job, plus freight, adhesive, and any seams' epoxy. If the job used 48 square feet from a slab you bought for a known price, allocate on the square feet consumed — including the waste between cuts. Off-cuts that become inventory are covered below.

Fabrication labor. Templating, cutting, polishing, cutouts, and seam work — hours multiplied by your loaded labor rate (wages plus burden — more on burden under overhead). If you track hours but pay hourly, convert before summing.

Install labor. The crew, the truck, and the drive time to and from the job. Install is where thin-margin jobs go quietly negative — a two-person crew on a slow install is real cost.

Tooling and consumables. Blade and diamond wear, polish pads, epoxy, seaming supplies, protection materials. These are per-job costs that shops routinely absorb as "just overhead" — until a quartzite job burns through tooling at twice the expected rate.

Subcontracted work. Stone repair specialists, crane or hoist services, third-party plumbing — anything another company billed for this job. Our waste percentage benchmarks article covers how material waste ranges by layout complexity, which feeds directly into the material column.

Block 3: overhead — the cost nobody loads

Rent, insurance, software, power, the admin salary — none of it belongs to one job, which is exactly why it never gets charged to any job. The fix is a loading rate: divide monthly overhead by monthly productive hours, and apply the result to every job as a sixth column.

A shop with $18,000 in monthly overhead and 400 productive hours carries $45 of overhead per hour worked. A job with 20 fabrication hours therefore carries $900 of overhead — not because someone decided that, but because that is what the shop costs to run. Without this line, a job can look profitable while the business loses money on it. Our profit margins guide walks through how shops benchmark this once the data exists.

The four formulas

With the header and cost columns filled, four calculations turn the worksheet into a decision tool:

Job margin ($) = Quoted total − Total cost (all columns). The dollar profit the job produced.

Job margin (%) = Job margin ÷ Quoted total. Compare every job against your target — and against your other jobs.

Effective price per square foot = Quoted total ÷ Square footage. What you actually earned per foot, after discounts, not what the price list says.

Variance vs. quote = Estimated cost at quote time − Actual cost. This is the number that tells you whether your estimating is improving — or drifting.

A worked example

Consider a hypothetical 48-square-foot quartz job quoted at $5,200. (These are example numbers chosen to show the math — not benchmarks. Substitute your own rates and invoices.)

Material: 62 slab-feet consumed (including waste) at a wholesale $34/ft² = $2,108.

Fabrication labor: 22 hours at a loaded $38/hr = $836. Install labor: 6 hours at $38/hr = $228.

Tooling and consumables: $95. Template and freight: $140. Overhead allocation: 28 productive hours × $45 = $1,260.

Total cost: $4,667. Margin: $533 — 10.3%. On a quote that felt fine. One slab priced above assumptions, one slow install, and the same job goes underwater. That is what the worksheet surfaces — not to punish the job, but to fix the estimating input that produced it.

The weekly close-out ritual

Job costing dies when it becomes archaeology. The habit that keeps it alive takes fifteen minutes: every Friday, close out every job completed that week. Fill the five columns from invoices and time logs, run the four formulas, and note the variance.

When a job's actuals drift from the estimate, name the cause in one sentence — material price, unforeseen cutout complexity, an install that ran long, a missed change order. Over a quarter, those sentences tell you which estimating habits to fix, and they feed directly into the common estimating mistakes that quietly recur. Change orders should show up here too — if a job grew mid-flight and the worksheet does not show it, see our change orders guide for capturing scope shifts before the stone is cut.

Five mistakes that corrupt the numbers

Double-counting remnants. If off-cuts go back into inventory, they are already charged as waste in this job's material column — do not also credit the job when the remnant is reused later, or the material cost of both jobs is wrong. Our remnant value calculator helps price what is actually sitting on the rack.

Tracking hours instead of dollars. Hours without a loaded rate cannot produce a margin. Convert at the point of capture.

Forgetting install drive time. A crew that works six hours and drives two has an eight-hour cost.

Charging templates and travel as "free." Failed templates, return trips, and measure visits are job costs — they just are not invoiced separately. They still consumed the day.

Loading overhead at zero. A worksheet without the overhead column will tell you every job is profitable. Businesses close anyway.

Where Lithiq fits

The math above is deliberately simple — the hard part is discipline, not arithmetic. Lithiq closes that gap by starting at the takeoff: square footage and material flow from the layout into the quote, the quote becomes the job, and actuals attach to the same record. When material use, fabrication time, and install hours live on one job, the margin calculation is not a weekly data-entry project — it is a number you can read on the dashboard the moment the job closes. The estimating workflow is where the estimated-cost baseline gets set, which is what variance measures against.

Frequently asked questions