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Job Costing Spreadsheet for Fab Shops
A free job costing spreadsheet built for fabrication and welding shops, with drop, rework and outside processing tracked separately. Download and notes.
Quick answer: here is the spreadsheet, no sign-up and no email required. It tracks drop, rework and outside processing separately, which is where fabrication margin actually goes, and its shop rate tab divides by productive hours instead of paid hours. That single difference is worth about eight dollars an hour on a typical six-person shop.
Download
Job costing spreadsheet for fabrication and welding shops (.xlsx)
Free to use and change, no attribution required. Opens in Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice and Numbers. Yellow cells are the ones you type in, green cells calculate themselves.
Five tabs:
| Tab | What it does |
|---|---|
| Read me | How to use it, in one screen |
| Shop rate | Produces the hourly rate every job uses |
| Job cost | One per job, estimate against actual with variance |
| Time log | Daily time by person and operation, with a rework flag |
| Material log | Material issued, used, and drop, with heat numbers |
Start With the Shop Rate, and the Error Almost Everyone Makes
Most shops calculate their rate by taking annual overhead and dividing it across the hours they pay for. That understates the rate every single time, because you do not sell every hour you pay for.
Work the arithmetic with realistic numbers for a six-person shop:
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Annual overhead | $270,000 |
| Loaded labour cost per hour | $46.36 |
| Paid hours per person | 2,080 |
| Less stat, vacation, sick | 240 |
| Less training, meetings, cleanup, waiting | 300 |
| Productive hours per person | 1,540 |
| Utilisation | 74% |
| Total productive shop hours | 9,240 |
Divide overhead across productive hours and you recover $29.22 per hour. Divide it across paid hours and you recover $21.63. At a 12 percent target margin, that is a shop rate of $85.89 against $77.26.
The gap is $8.63 an hour. Across 9,240 productive hours that is roughly $79,700 a year of overhead you never recovered, on work you correctly quoted and correctly delivered.
The Shop rate tab calculates both figures and shows you the gap, so you can see what your own numbers do.
The Four Things This Template Does Differently
Drop and offcut has its own column. Most templates charge the job for the material the part needed. This one charges for what was issued, including the piece you could not use. On plate and structural work that difference is the single most common place fabrication margin disappears, and it is invisible in an accounting package.
Rework is a separate line. When rework is absorbed into the original job, every job costs roughly what it should have and you learn nothing. Broken out, a pattern appears within a quarter.
Outside processing carries dates. Galvanising, plating and heat treat leave mid-job and come back. The cost routinely lands after the job is closed, or on the wrong job entirely. Sent and returned dates catch that.
The shop rate uses productive hours. Covered above, and it is the one that moves the most money.
How to Actually Use It
- Fill in the Shop rate tab once. Revisit it annually, or whenever you add staff or space.
- Copy the Job cost tab per job and rename it with the job number.
- Log time daily on the Time log tab. This is the part that decides whether any of it is true.
- Log material as it is issued, capturing the heat number if your customers ask for certificates.
Point three is not a formality. Time recorded a week later is a reconstruction, and a job cost built from reconstructions tells you what people remember instead of what happened. If daily recording is genuinely impossible in your shop, that is worth knowing, because it puts a hard ceiling on how accurate any system can be for you, spreadsheet or otherwise.
Where This Stops Working
Being straight about this, because the answer is not “immediately.”
A spreadsheet is the right tool while one person owns it and the volumes are small. It costs nothing, needs no implementation, and bends to whatever you need this week. Plenty of profitable shops run exactly this way and should keep doing it.
It stops at three specific points:
- Concurrency. Two people need to change the same data and you start getting conflicting versions.
- History. Somebody disputes a number and you cannot show who changed what, when, or what it was before.
- Reconciliation. These figures have to agree with your accounting system, and two independent records always drift.
Our spreadsheets vs an operations platform comparison goes through those three in detail, including the fixes that cost nothing and are worth trying before you buy anything.
There is also a risk nobody prices. If month end depends on knowledge that lives in one person’s head and one file, the exposure is continuity more than accuracy. That is usually the argument that actually moves an owner.
What This Will Show You Within a Quarter
Run it honestly on three jobs and a pattern appears. Most shops find their leak concentrated in one or two places, consistently:
- Drop and offcut nobody charged
- Weld time under-recorded, because welders are welding instead of clocking
- Rework absorbed into the original job
- Outside processing landing late or on the wrong job
- Material price moving between quote and purchase
- Consumables written to overhead and never attributed
Every one of those is a timing or attribution failure instead of a pricing failure. That is why shops respond to thin margins by sharpening the quote and nothing changes. The quote was roughly right. The cost was never measured.
Our metal fabrication guide covers each of the six in depth, and what a system does about them once the spreadsheet runs out.
Related
- Job costing explains budget against committed against actual, which is the reporting most job shops never build
- ERP for Alberta manufacturing companies covers traceability, CRN registration and the wider manufacturing picture
- Calgary software planning guide covers what to measure before shopping for anything
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is the job costing spreadsheet free?
- Yes. Download it, change it, rename it, use it commercially. No sign-up, no email address, no attribution required. It is an .xlsx file with working formulas and it opens in Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice, and Numbers.
- What does this template do that free ones do not?
- Four things. Drop and offcut gets its own column so the job is charged for what was consumed instead of what was theoretically needed. Rework is a separate line instead of being absorbed into the original job. Outside processing carries a sent date and a returned date. And the shop rate divides by productive hours instead of paid hours, which is the most common arithmetic error in shop rate calculation.
- How do I calculate my shop rate?
- Add annual overhead to loaded labour cost, divide by productive hours, then divide by one minus your target profit margin. The step people get wrong is dividing by paid hours. A welder paid 2,080 hours a year is rarely productive for more than about 1,540 of them once stat, vacation, training, meetings and cleanup come out. The Shop rate tab does this arithmetic and shows you what the error would have cost.
- When does a job costing spreadsheet stop working?
- At three specific points. When more than one person needs to change the same data at once, when you need a history of who changed what and when, and when these numbers have to reconcile to your accounting system. Until you hit those, a spreadsheet is the correct and cheapest answer, and moving off one early is its own mistake.
- Can I use this for a machine shop or a general contractor?
- The structure works for any job-based business. The operation names on the Time log tab are fabrication-specific, meaning cut and prep, fit, weld, and finish, so change those to your own operations. Everything else, including the shop rate arithmetic and the estimate against actual comparison, applies unchanged.