You finish a job on a Friday afternoon. Big domestic — full house re-skim, dot and dab on the extension, artex ceilings in the two bedrooms. Three weeks on site. You’ve invoiced it, customer’s happy, and you’re driving home thinking yeah, decent week.
But did you actually make money on it?
Not turnover. Not what the customer paid. What you made, after the board, the beads, the jointing compound, the labour — after everything went out.
Most plasterers haven’t got a clue. Not because they’re not good at their job. Because there’s no easy way to see it. You’re pricing jobs off instinct, buying materials on the card, and hoping the number at the end of the month adds up. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. You never quite know why.
Here’s the one that kills plasterers more than anything else. You priced a job in March. Big commercial unit — stud partitions, full plaster finish, suspended ceiling infills. You quoted £14,500 and got it.
Job starts in May. Board goes up, you’re a week in, and you realise the spec’s changed. More rooms. Different finish on two of the floors. The groundworker’s late so you’ve lost four days. You crack on anyway because you want to keep the relationship.
You invoice the £14,500 in June. But you’ve spent £6,200 in materials and had three lads on it for nearly four weeks. By the time you work it out on the back of a fag packet, you’ve made about £800. On a six-week job.
The quote was right for the original spec. The job changed and nobody updated the numbers.
When you’re running a domestic and a commercial job at the same time, it gets messy. Materials for one get used on the other. One of your lads helps out on the other site for a day and you forget to move the cost across. The invoice for the domestic goes out before you’ve fully added everything up.
It’s not sloppy. It’s just what happens when you’re managing it all in your head and a couple of WhatsApps.
The problem is every time costs bleed between jobs, you’re flying blind. You think one job was decent and the other was okay, but actually one of them lost you money and you didn’t realise until three months later when the bank balance told you.
Big commercial jobs are the worst for this. You’re maybe 8 weeks into a contract. You’ve put £15k of labour in, another £4k of materials. The application isn’t due until the end of the month and the main contractor pays 60 days from application.
So you’re sat there in week 8, basically funding the job yourself. Wages are going out every week. Materials on the card. And the money’s not coming back in for another six or seven weeks.
That gap — that’s what kills otherwise decent plastering businesses. Not the work drying up. The cashflow gap between doing the work and getting paid for it.
You need to be able to see it coming before it hits you.
Grafter Lab isn’t complicated. It doesn’t need to be.
Every skimming job, every dot and dab contract goes in when you start it. Quote, materials, labour. As the job runs, you add costs as they happen. When your lad picks up another bag of multi-finish, it goes on the job. When you add a day’s labour, it goes on the job.
At any point you can pull it up and see: what have I spent, what have I invoiced, what’s the gross profit sitting at right now.
On a domestic, you’ll know by day three if the job’s gone sideways. On a commercial contract, you can see exactly where you are on every application — what’s certified, what’s outstanding, what’s still to come.
And the cashflow forecast. Twelve weeks out, it shows you what’s coming in based on your invoices and expected payment dates. So that six-week gap on the commercial job — you can see it eight weeks before it hits you, not the week your bank account goes quiet.
This isn’t about spreadsheets or end-of-year stuff. It’s about knowing, today, whether the skimming job you’re standing in is making you money.
Most plasterers don’t have that. They’ve got a rough idea, a gut feeling, and a bank balance that tells them something a month after the fact.
Grafter Lab gives you the live number. Job opens, costs go in, you can see your GP on every job as it runs. No spreadsheet. No phoning the accountant. Just the number.
Free 30-day trial — no card needed. Set up takes about ten minutes.