Costing a fab job past the steel
Steel is the easy part of job costing. Plate and sections arrive with an invoice and a heat number, and anyone can code them to a job. The margin leaks in everything the invoice never itemizes: welding wire, shielding gas, grinding discs, plasma consumables and the fitter hours burned before an arc ever strikes. We build job records that capture all of it, so the profit you see on a finished job is the profit you actually earned.
The mechanics are simple and strict:
- Material at delivered cost: plate, HSS and bar coded to the job from the supplier invoice with freight included, plus a plain rule for returning usable offcuts to stock so year-end inventory stays a number, not an argument.
- Consumables as a burn rate: wire, gas and abrasives cannot be traced weld by weld, so we load them onto labour hours and true the rate up against actual purchases every quarter.
- Labour at loaded cost: wages plus CPP, EI, vacation pay and WSIB premiums, split between fit-up and weld-out where the shop tracks it.
- Outside processing on the job: galvanizing, powder coat and sent-out cutting belong to the work order, never to overhead.
QuickBooks Online holds the job structure, Dext captures the supplier paperwork behind every input tax credit, and Plooto pays the steel bills on schedule instead of whenever someone remembers.
Repair work and contract fabrication are different businesses
A repair job is quoted in minutes, welded in hours and often paid before the customer's trailer leaves the yard. A contract fabrication job starts with drawings, carries a deposit, bills on progress and ships weeks later. Run both through one income line and you cannot tell which side of the shop pays the rent, so we split revenue and direct costs by stream and print a gross margin for each every month.
| In the books | Repair work | Contract fabrication |
|---|---|---|
| Quote to cash | Same week, often same day | Deposit, progress billings, final on delivery |
| Cost profile | Labour-heavy, little material | Material-heavy, long work in progress |
| Margin risk | Underpriced call-out rates | Steel repricing and scope creep |
| What we watch | Realized rate per welder hour | Cost to date against the estimate |
Jobs that cross a month-end sit in work in progress, with deposits and progress billings held against cost to date, so your statements do not swing from hero to zero depending on which week a big job shipped.
The day your welders leave the shop
Field work changes the paperwork the moment the rig truck rolls. General contractors report what they pay you on T5018 slips, progress billings carry the 10% holdback under Ontario's Construction Act, and site hours can fall under a different WSIB classification than shop fabrication. So the books keep field revenue, holdback receivables and site hours on their own lines all year, which is exactly what Corporate Tax Filing needs when CRA matches those slips against your return.
Holdbacks get their own receivable account, aged on expected release dates rather than invoice dates, so a healthy holdback due after the lien period never reads as a collection problem in your receivables report.
Certification is overhead with a renewal date
CWB certification under CSA W47.1 is a standing cost of being in business: welder qualifications renewing on a two-year cycle, procedure qualifications when you add a process or position, and the audits that keep the certificate current. We book it as its own overhead category, visible and forecastable, so the shop rate you quote actually recovers it instead of absorbing it silently. The same goes for the crane, the forklift and the building: ownership costs roll into a rate you can defend, not a shrug.
One roof for books, payroll and the T2
Our End-to-End Accounting service delivers bookkeeping, payroll, financial reporting and tax filing together. Every month you get reconciled books, margin by stream, payroll run with source deductions remitted on time, and an HST position built on real input tax credits from steel, gas and fuel against Ontario's 13% charged on your invoices. At year-end the same file becomes the T2 without a clean-up bill. We work with fab shops across Mississauga and the GTA, and every engagement starts with a free 15-minute discovery call and a written quote.
