A septic install bid at $9,200 looks solid until you count the 90 minutes of drive time each way, the $380 dump fee, the $180 permit, and the half day the drill rig sits idle because the next job is 40 miles away.
Septic installers and well drillers bill by the job, but they pay by the route. The crew, the rig, and the inspector all move, and the hours they move are hours you pay.
Per-Job Costing That Includes the Road
Drive time: Crew hours × loaded rate, door to door, not just on site. A two-person crew at $28 per hour loaded for 3 hours of drive time is $168 before any trench is dug.
Rig and equipment: Depreciation or lease on the excavator, drill rig, and support truck, plus fuel and maintenance, allocated per job by hours or days. A $120,000 excavator over 1,500 billable days is $80 per day.
Fees: Permits, inspections, and dump fees are direct job costs, not overhead. A $380 dump fee that is coded to general expense disappears from job costing and reappears as a margin surprise.
Subcontract: Perc test or engineering, if subcontracted, is a direct cost with its own markup, not a pass-through.
The bid check: Job cost + overhead per job + profit. Overhead per job is total monthly overhead / jobs per month. A $12,000 monthly overhead over 15 jobs is $800 per job. If the job cost is $6,400 and overhead is $800, the bid needs to be $9,200 at 20% profit just to hold margin.
Route Profitability
Rank jobs and days by contribution per crew-hour, not by revenue. A $9,200 job that takes a crew 2 days (32 crew-hours) with $6,400 in direct cost contributes $2,000 over direct, or $62.50 per crew-hour. A $5,500 well repair that takes 8 crew-hours with $2,200 direct contributes $2,500, or $312.50 per crew-hour — even though the revenue is lower.
Dense routes — two jobs in the same county in one mobilization — win on drive time and dump fee amortization. Book drive time and dump fees by job so density shows up as higher margin on the dense day.
Keep Your Finances Organized From Day One
Septic and well work is a mobilization business. Job cost that includes drive time, rig time, and fees keeps the bid honest, and route profitability keeps the schedule honest.
Beancount.io keeps each job as a cost object with drive, rig, and fee legs, version-controlled and comparable across routes. Get started for free and make the next bid cover the road, not just the trench.