Free tools · Cost-per-job calculator
Free tool no. 2 —
What does a booked job actually cost you?
Five sliders and the one number your ad company never leads with: what you pay, per job, after the whole funnel has taken its cut.
Set the dials to your shop
Ads, SEO, directories, mailers — the whole envelope
Calls and forms from marketing — not repeats or referrals
Booked, completed, invoiced — be honest
Blended service and replacement average
After labor, parts, and the truck — before overhead
The ledger, kept honestly
Marketing as a share of revenue
36.1%
RUNNING HOT
A fifth or more of revenue is going back out the door for marketing. Something in the machine is slipping.
First 17 jobs each month pay the marketing bill; profit starts at job 18.
Every point of booking rate and every dollar of cost-per-job traces back to the same machinery: pages that convert, calls that get answered, and tracking that tells the truth. Want these numbers pulled from your real books — free?
Fair use · No limits, no login, no meter — the math runs right in your browser and costs nobody anything. Slide the dials all afternoon. Want the same numbers pulled from your real books? That part is also free.
Ask what a click costs and any dashboard will answer to the penny. Ask what a booked job costs and the room goes quiet — yet that second number is the one that decides whether the marketing feeds the shop or feeds on it. The arithmetic above is the whole trick: spend, divided by the jobs the spend actually produced, held up against the margin those jobs carry. No login, no grading curve, no opinion — just your own figures, arranged so they can’t hide from each other.
Two of these dials deserve suspicion. The booking rate is where most shops lose quietly — the ad worked, the phone rang, and then the call went to voicemail or the page asked too much of a customer standing in a hot kitchen. And the lead count is where agencies get generous, counting every ring as a victory. Honest tracking separates the marketing that books work from the marketing that merely bills — the full argument is in our Dispatch ledger on lead costs, and the fix for ads priced by the click instead of the job is a service of the house.
From the counter
About the math
What is a healthy cost per booked job?+
It varies by market and job mix, but the steadier yardstick is marketing as a share of revenue: established shops typically run five to ten percent. Above ten percent, something in the machine — the pages, the answering, the targeting — is usually slipping. Above twenty, the marketing is eating the margin it was hired to create.
Why measure cost per job instead of cost per lead?+
Because leads don’t pay invoices — jobs do. A cheap lead that never books is the most expensive kind there is. Cost per booked job forces every stage of the funnel — the ad, the landing page, the phone answering — to justify itself in the only unit that matters.
My agency reports clicks and impressions. How do I get these numbers?+
That reporting gap is the point. You need three figures nobody should hide from you: what you spent, how many leads it produced, and how many became paying work. If your current reporting can’t produce them, that is a finding in itself — call tracking and honest attribution are installable equipment.
Don’t sweat it —
Drive the number down.
Faster pages, answered calls, and honest attribution all pull cost-per-job in the same direction. One phone call prices the whole machine — from the person who builds it.
One craftsman · One promise · 7–10 days to launch