Overhead costs are expenses your business incurs regardless of any specific job. Job costs are expenses you can directly tie to a particular project or customer.

Examples of overhead include office rent, business insurance, administrative salaries, accounting fees, marketing, phone bills, and software subscriptions. These costs exist whether you have one active job or ten.

Job costs include materials purchased for a specific project, labor hours worked on that project, subcontractors hired for that job, equipment rented specifically for that work, and permits pulled for that customer. The common thread is that you can point to a specific project and say this expense was for that work.

The separation starts in your chart of accounts. Create expense accounts for overhead items and separate accounts for direct costs. When you enter a transaction, overhead goes to the general expense account. Direct costs get coded both to the expense account and to the specific job or project.

QuickBooks and most accounting software let you assign transactions to jobs, customers, or projects. A Benton County bookkeeping service familiar with job costing can set up the right structure from the start, making sure your chart of accounts reflects how your business actually operates.

Some expenses fall in gray areas. Your work truck depreciates whether you’re on a job or not, but you only put miles on it when driving to jobs. Some businesses treat vehicles as pure overhead for simplicity. Others allocate vehicle costs to jobs based on mileage or hours used. Pick a method that makes sense for your business and apply it consistently.

Small tools and supplies often trip people up. A $50 box of screws used across multiple jobs isn’t worth tracking by project. Call it overhead or create a shop supplies overhead account. A $500 specialized tool bought for one particular job becomes a job cost.

The goal isn’t perfect precision. It’s having enough accuracy to know which jobs actually make money. If you’re dumping everything into overhead, your job profit numbers are artificially high because they don’t include real costs. If you’re over-allocating to jobs, your overhead looks too lean and you’re not pricing to cover it.

For construction contractors and other project-based businesses, getting this separation right is essential for knowing your true margins. Review your coding monthly and adjust when you find costs landing in the wrong bucket. Knowing your true overhead also helps with pricing because you need to mark up job costs enough to cover it and still make profit.