Reading your margin
What the margin percentage on a job means, why it sometimes shows a dash, and what the colours are telling you.
What the number means
Projected margin is the share of the contract value you have not yet spent on labor and materials. SiteLedger takes the contract value, subtracts everything spent to date, divides by the contract value, and shows the result as a percentage.
It is projected because the job is not finished. It answers one question: if I stopped spending right now, what share of this contract would be left. It is not a profit and loss statement, and it does not know about your overhead.
A worked example
A $40,000 job with $14,000 of labor and $8,000 of materials has spent $22,000. Projected profit is $18,000 and margin reads 45.0 percent.
Two more weeks of crew time adds $6,000. Spend is now $28,000, projected profit is $12,000, and margin drops to 30.0 percent. Nothing about the contract changed. The margin moved because the cost did, which is the whole point of watching it weekly.
Margin goes negative when you overrun. That same $40,000 job with $52,000 of cost reads -30.0 percent. SiteLedger does not floor it at zero, because an overrun you cannot see is an overrun you cannot bill for.
Why margin shows a dash
A dash is not an error and it is not zero. It means SiteLedger has nothing honest to calculate from, and there are exactly two reasons for it.
- The job has no contract value, so there is nothing to measure spend against
- No cost has been posted to the job yet
The second one matters. A job nobody has coded costs to is not a hundred percent margin job, it is a job with no data, and showing 100 percent would read like a real number. The dash goes away as soon as the first timesheet or receipt lands.
What the colours mean
- Red: below 15 percent
- Amber: 15 percent up to 25 percent
- Green: 25 percent and above
These are fixed bands, the same on the job page and in the profitability table. They are a rough signal, not a judgement about your trade. If your work normally runs at a tighter margin than that, read the number and ignore the colour.
Margin across every job
Your dashboard shows an average job margin. That is the plain average of the margin percentages on your active jobs, so a small job and a large one pull on it equally. Jobs marked complete or closed are left out, as are jobs still showing a dash.
The Reports page shows an overall margin instead. That one adds up the contract value of every job, subtracts total spend, and divides, so bigger jobs weigh more. The two figures will differ, and both are correct for what they measure.