About this site
Fifty notes on labour cost control and job costing, written for the people who have to say what an hour costs and then live with the number: cost accountants, operations and commercial managers, anybody who prices work by the hour, and whoever maintains the spreadsheet the rate actually comes out of.
What it covers
What one hour is — worked, paid and charged are three different quantities. The wage, and the five ordinary layers that sit on it. Which hours the loaded cost has to be divided by, and what the choice does to the answer. How an hour gets onto a job, the work that resists attribution, and where an hour goes when it reaches none. What is in the overhead pool and what spreads it. And the decisions a rate cannot support.
What it leaves out
Capacity planning and forecasting. Both are separate problems with their own literature, and neither is improved by a better rate.
Payroll operation, employment law and tax treatment. What must be contributed, what may be charged to a job, how employment costs must be treated and what a rate may be used for differ by jurisdiction, by sector, by accounting framework and by agreement, and they change. Those are questions for somebody qualified where you are.
About the figures
Every number on this site is an illustration of what one employer recorded for itself, and is labelled as such. None of them is a benchmark, a survey result or a statement of what any method requires. Currency figures are in pounds because they come from one employer's own records; nothing turns on the currency.