How to cost contractor jobs and change orders on Starch

Contractor job costing is the practice of tracking what a job actually costs — labor, materials, subcontractors, equipment — against what you estimated, and updating that number as work progresses and change orders land. It sounds straightforward until you're three weeks into a project and the change order log lives in one spreadsheet, the invoices are in QuickBooks, the crew hours are in a time-tracking app, and nobody has a current cost-to-complete figure. The result is that you find out a job lost money after it closes, not while you still have levers to pull. What this workflow looks like in practice varies — a GC running multi-trade projects has different data flows than a specialty sub or a facilities operator managing a vendor roster — but the core problem is the same: too much latency between when costs are incurred and when someone who can act on them sees them. On Starch, you end up with a live job cost view that pulls your actual spend from QuickBooks or your bank accounts, sits next to your original estimate and any approved change orders, and flags jobs where cost-to-complete is trending over budget. No manual export. No reconciliation sprint at month end. You see the number on the job, updated, when you open the dashboard — and if a job crosses your contingency threshold, you hear about it before the next site visit.