Firmabuilt Crew
You know what payroll cost. You don't know what the bathroom cost.
Sub the work out and the invoice does your accounting for you: $8,400, drywall, done. Run your own crew and there is no invoice — just a payroll number, and four generalists who touched six scopes this week. Crew closes that gap: hours land on the task they were worked on, priced at what that hour actually costs you, and the scope's real number builds itself while the job runs.
Self-performed work is the only cost on the job with nobody itemising it
Subs itemise themselves
A subcontractor hands you a number attached to a scope. The allocation is free — you couldn't lose it if you tried. That's why every builder knows what their tile guy costs.
Your crew doesn't
The same four guys frame Monday, hang doors Tuesday, chase a leak Wednesday, paint Thursday. Payroll sees one number for the week. The bathroom, the kitchen and the roof all paid into it and none of them can prove how much.
So the next bid is a guess
You finish the flip knowing exactly what it cost in total, and nothing about which scope ate the margin. Ten flips later you still price self-performed work from memory — the one part of the job you control most and measure least.
The usual answer is cost codes: teach everyone the list, and ask them to pick the right one each time the work changes. It works on a commercial site where a man frames all week. It falls apart on a flip, where the work changes five times a day and the code is a second thing to remember after the work itself.
So we moved the clock onto the task
Not onto a job, not onto a code — onto the specific scheduled task the person was already sent to do. Everything downstream follows from that one decision.
- 1
Crew clock into the work, not a dropdown
A worker opens their phone and sees today's tasks on their job. They tap the one they're starting. There is no job field to mistype and no cost code to remember — the task already knows which scope, which trade and which cost code it belongs to, because it was scheduled that way.
- 2
Hours become burdened dollars at clock-out
Duration is multiplied by that worker's rate and their burden multiplier — the loaded cost of an hour, not the wage. Both are snapshotted onto the timecard when the shift is worked, so the number is what the hour cost that day.
- 3
The cost lands on the scope by itself
Labor posts into the same ledger as receipts and sub invoices, inheriting the task's scope package and cost code. Your guest bath shows tile, the plumber's invoice and 34 hours of your own crew in one total — while the job is still running, not at the closing table.
- 4
The finished job becomes a rate you can bid from
Archive the flip and those scope totals join your rate library: what your crew's tile install actually runs per square foot, low, average and high, across every job you've closed. Self-performed work stops being the part you guess at.
What that looks like on a scope
An illustration, not a screenshot — but the labor line is the point: nobody typed it, and nobody had to remember a code for it to be there.
Guest bath
estimated $6,800- Tile, fixtures, trim — receipts
- $2,140
- Plumber — sub invoice
- $1,900
- Your crew — 34.5 h, burdened
- $1,304
$1,456 under — and you know it now, not in March.
The details that decide whether the number is true
Labor costing is easy to build badly. These are the four places it usually goes wrong, and what we do about each.
Burden, not wage
An hour of a $28 carpenter doesn't cost $28. Payroll taxes, workers' comp — brutal on framing and roofing class codes — liability, PTO: the loaded number is routinely a third higher. Cost your scopes at wage and self-performing looks cheaper than subbing when it isn't. Every worker carries a burden multiplier, and it's applied before the cost is booked.
A raise doesn't rewrite history
Rates are snapshotted onto the timecard at clock-in rather than looked up later. Give somebody a raise in June and your March scope costs stay exactly what March cost — which is what makes an archived job usable as a rate rather than a moving target.
Unplanned work is captured, then classified
Real days don't wait for the schedule. Someone gets sent to meet an inspector or chase a leak, and the honest options elsewhere are to clock into a lie or not clock in at all. Unscheduled time goes to a holding task with a required note, and a manager moves it onto the right scope afterwards — the cost follows the reassignment.
Help gets flagged as help
When somebody works a task they weren't assigned to, the hours are recorded and marked as assist. The cost is still correct, and the pattern is worth reading: a task that keeps pulling in extra bodies was under-scoped, and it will be under-scoped on the next job too unless you can see it.
And the clock-in has to happen on site
Set a boundary on the job and clock-ins from somewhere else are flagged for review — not blocked. A flag on a timecard is a conversation, not a locked door; nobody is ever stopped from starting work. Timecards generated this way are owned by the system: you edit the shift, never the money, so the ledger and the timesheets can't quietly disagree.
Where this sits next to the tools you've tried
Plenty of software touches labor cost. What's rare is the join — one object that is both the thing you scheduled and the thing the money lands on.
Time-tracking apps
- What they do
- Capture hours on a phone and tag them to a job and a cost code.
- What's missing
- The worker classifies the work. On a generalist crew that's the step that quietly fails, and there's no schedule underneath — no sequence, no float, no idea what the delay costs.
Construction accounting and payroll
- What they do
- Allocate labor to job cost properly, burden and all — this is what it's built for.
- What's missing
- It happens in the back office, after payroll, in a system your foreman never opens. You find out in the period close, which is too late to change anything on the job.
Enterprise CPM schedulers
- What they do
- Resource-load activities with rates and compare planned against actual cost per activity.
- What's missing
- Nobody's carpenter clocks into one. Actuals arrive by import or by somebody typing them in, and the licence and setup are priced for a general contractor with a scheduling department.
A crew of eight running flips is too small for the first kind of system and too serious for the second. Crew is built for exactly that operation: the schedule, the ledger and the timecard are the same three tables, so the cost of a scope is never a reconciliation job — it's just what the rows already add up to.
Crew
The tier where your crew's hours become job cost.
$300/month
- 5 admin seats
- 15 active jobs
- Worker seats $8/month each
- Crew timecards with geofencing
- Unlimited archived jobs, free forever
- Everything in Pro
Questions about labor costing
Do my guys have to pick a cost code?
No. They pick the task they're working on — which they'd be looking at anyway — and the coding comes from the task. The scope, trade and cost code were decided when the work was scheduled, by the person who knows the budget, not by somebody standing on a ladder.
Does it use the wage or the real cost of an hour?
The real cost. Each worker has an hourly rate and a burden multiplier covering payroll taxes, workers' comp, insurance and time off, and labor is booked at the burdened figure. Costing at wage is the most common way job-cost numbers end up flattering self-performed work.
What happens when someone works on something that isn't scheduled?
The time still gets captured. Unscheduled work goes to a per-job holding task with a required note explaining what happened, and a manager reassigns it to the right scope later. Time recorded roughly beats time not recorded at all — unrecorded labor is margin that disappears with no trace of where it went.
If I give someone a raise, do my old jobs get more expensive?
No. The rate and burden are copied onto the timecard when the shift is worked, so historical costs are frozen at what they actually cost. That's what makes finished jobs usable as a rate library instead of a number that drifts every time payroll changes.
Can I still run subcontracted scopes alongside crew work?
That's the normal case. Sub invoices, receipts and your crew's hours all post to the same scope, so a bathroom your crew tiled and a plumber roughed shows one honest total. It also lets you compare, over time, what a scope costs subbed out versus self-performed.
Do I need the Crew plan for job costing?
You need it for crew labor costing, because that's the plan with worker seats and timecards. Solo and Pro cost jobs from receipts, contracts and sub invoices — everything except your own crew's hours, which only matters if you employ your own crew.
Find out what your own crew costs you
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