Your budget worksheet is how SynkedUP learns what it costs to run your business. Once it knows your costs, it prices every estimate to cover your overhead and hit your profit goal. This article walks through each section, explains the numbers it produces, and shows how to make changes.
Your budget looks 12 months ahead. Use last year's numbers (your P&L) as a reference, but fill it in with what you expect over the next 12 months.
New to budgets? For click-by-click setup steps, see Success Checklist: How to Create your Budget.
1. Labor
Enter the people who do the field work, what you pay them, and how many hours they'll work in a year.
Unbillable hours: not every hour on the clock can be charged to a customer. Vacation, holidays, rain days, shop time and office work are all unbillable. 15–20% unbillable is typical, and owners usually run higher. Start there and fine-tune once you're tracking time in SynkedUP.
Owners who work in the field: if you pay yourself a salary but also work in the field, your field hours still count as billable labor hours.
People who don't do field work (a salesperson or office manager, for example) go under Overhead, not Labor.
Payroll taxes and workers' comp go under Overhead, not in the wage.
2. Materials
Enter what you expect to spend on materials in the next 12 months — your cost, not what you charge customers.
3. Equipment
For each piece of equipment, enter:
Replacement cost — if it broke down today and you had to replace it this afternoon, what would you spend?
How long you'll keep it
What it will be worth when you're done with it
This sets money aside so you're ready when it's time to replace things.
4. Subcontractors
Enter what you expect to spend on subs in the next 12 months.
5. Overhead
Everything else the business pays for that isn't tied to one specific job — office staff and salespeople, payroll taxes, insurance, rent, utilities and phones, software, advertising, accounting, fuel, repairs, small tools and consumables, and vehicle registrations and local business taxes (not income tax or sales tax).
Leave out costs you pass through to the customer. If you charge permits or equipment rentals to the job, don't also put them in overhead, or you'll recover them twice.
6. Net profit goal
Enter the profit you want to keep after every cost is covered (for example, 20%). SynkedUP uses this and your costs to work out your sales target for the year.
How your overhead gets recovered
At the bottom of the worksheet, you choose which costs get marked up to cover your overhead.
The most common setup is 15% on materials. SynkedUP then automatically puts the rest on labor.
These percentages won't add up to 100% — that's normal.
Subs: we suggest marking subs up for profit only, not overhead. Sub spending swings a lot year to year, and if you have a slow sub year, that share of your overhead never gets covered.
Equipment: we don't recommend recovering overhead on equipment unless you have a firm grasp of how the budget works.
The numbers on your Overview page
All of these show on the budget worksheet Overview page — even before you apply the budget:
Manhour Cost — your average wage, weighted by the hours each person works. It updates automatically from the Labor section.
Break-even (per hour) — what you'd have to charge per hour just to cover all your costs, with zero profit.
Labor Rate — what you'll charge the customer per hour. It's your wage plus your share of overhead plus your profit.
Break-even higher than you expected? It's just math. There are three ways to bring it down:
Lower your profit goal (not usually recommended)
Cut expenses
Add billable hours — the more hours you spread your costs across, the lower each hour costs. (This only helps if you have the work to fill those hours.)
Markup vs. margin (this trips up a lot of people)
SynkedUP uses both, in different places:
Overhead recovery is a markup — a percentage added on top of your cost.
Profit is a margin — a percentage of the final selling price.
Example: a $100 material item, with 15% overhead recovery and a 20% profit goal:
Your cost: $100.00
+ 15% overhead markup ($100 × 1.15) = $115.00 — your break-even
20% profit margin ($115 ÷ 0.80) = $143.75 — the customer's price
Your profit is $28.75, which is 20% of the $143.75 selling price.
If you'd simply added 20% on top of $115, you'd charge $138.00 and your profit would only be about 17% of the price. That's why a "20% profit" in SynkedUP can look higher than the 20% markup you may be used to. In this example, the total markup on your original cost works out to about 44%.
(Any sales tax you pay on materials is added to your cost before overhead goes on.)
Using your P&L to fill it in
Field employee wages → Labor
Materials purchased → Materials
Subcontractor costs → Subcontractors
All other operating expenses → Overhead
Equipment depreciation → don't use it. Enter replacement value in Equipment instead.
Changing your budget
You can't edit a budget once it's applied. To make changes:
Make a copy of your current budget worksheet.
Make your changes on the copy.
Apply the new worksheet.
When you save, you'll choose whether to update your unsold jobs with the new pricing or use the new pricing only from today forward.
Want help with your numbers? Questions like whether your break-even looks right, what to pay yourself, or how to price for your market are best answered on a budget call with our team. Reach out in the chat and we'll set one up.