Getting started with JobCount
JobCount tracks what your crews did, what it was worth, and what everyone gets paid. Set-up takes about ten minutes and the order matters — each step below depends on the one above it.
Your first ten minutes
Do these in order. Skipping straight to logging jobs is what produces a week of work that totals $0.
-
Pick your markets
A market is a client or contract you work under — the people whose rate card you get paid from. Registration drops you straight into market settings; toggle on the ones you work, or scroll to the bottom to create your own if it isn’t listed.
You can come back and change this at any time. Most people start with one and add more as they take on work.
-
Enter your price list
Open a market and go to Prices. This is the step people skip, and it is the one that matters: JobCount prices every job from the codes on it, and a new market starts with every price set to zero. Jobs will log perfectly and total nothing.
Put in the rates you are genuinely paid, per code. Change a rate later and the jobs using it re-price — useful when a rate was entered wrong, worth checking when a week has already been paid.
-
Create a week
Under Weeks, set a start and end date matching your real billing cycle and payday — not the calendar week, unless those happen to agree. Jobs land in the week whose dates contain them, so a job dated outside every week you have created has nowhere to go.
-
Log your jobs
Open the week and add jobs as you finish them. A job carries its number, optionally an address and city, and the codes for the work done — the codes come from the price list you just entered.
JobCount prices the job as you save it, and rolls that into your daily and weekly totals. Logging as you go beats reconstructing a fortnight from memory on a Sunday night.
-
Check the week before it closes
Look at the weekly total against what you expect to be invoiced. A gap is nearly always a missing job or a code priced at zero, and both are far easier to fix now than after the pay period is settled.
Once that’s running
What the rest of the platform does. You do not need any of it on day one.
Crews & payroll
Add the people who work for you, set how each is paid, and let pay periods build from the jobs and hours already logged. A settled period stops recalculating so a later edit cannot rewrite a paid cheque.
Maps & projects
Plot the footprint you are building in, keep project geometry alongside the jobs, and export a map book when someone needs the whole build on paper.
Invoicing & expenses
Turn completed work into an invoice, track what the business spends against it, and see what is actually left at the end of a month.
Repair shops
The shop side: work orders, a customer garage, a booking calendar, mechanic pay and customer-facing estimates. Everything is scoped to the shop you pick in the top bar.
Phone & messaging
Take calls in the app, text customers about their vehicle, and send quotes they can open on their phone. Texting requires a recorded opt-in, which the app enforces rather than trusts.
Marketing
Tracked landing pages with the click→lead→booking→paid-job funnel behind them, so you can see which advertising produced work and which produced clicks.
Two habits worth forming
Keep the price list honest
Every number JobCount shows you is derived from it. A rate that drifted out of date doesn’t announce itself — it just makes every total quietly wrong, and you find out when an invoice comes back short. When a contract changes, update the prices the same day.
Log jobs the day they happen
Not for tidiness — for accuracy. Jobs reconstructed at the end of a pay period are the ones that go in with the wrong date, the wrong code, or not at all, and a missing job is money you already earned and won’t bill for.