How do you report profit by job category per quarter in ServiceM8?

What ServiceM8 records, and what it guesses

Profit per category is only as good as three pieces of data on each job.

The category. Job Categories are set in Settings, Job Categories and chosen on the job card next to the status. Put the category in every Job Template and Service so jobs are never created without one. If you rename a category, every old job shows the new name, because jobs link to the category record. To keep history clean, create a new category rather than renaming one.

Material cost. Each material has a Price and a Purchase Cost. If ServiceM8 is connected to Xero, the Purchase Cost syncs from your accounting items. Items with no purchase cost count as pure profit.

Labour and admin cost. Job Costing treats any item with "labour" or "labor" in its item number or name as labour, and uses its Purchase Cost as the hourly cost. Hours come from check in time or from the labour quantity billed. It also counts admin time spent in the job card at a default of $20 an hour, which you can change on the Admin Time item. If your labour items are called something else, such as "Electrician hourly", they are costed as materials, not labour.

Where the native reports stop

Without Job Costing, the nearest native report is Revenue By Category: revenue from Completed jobs that have been Approved in Invoicing, by the month they were completed. That is revenue, not profit, and an unapproved job does not appear at all.

With Job Costing on (Premium plan and up) and the Advanced Reporting Pack switched on (available on all plans), Custom Reports can show Jobs Profit and Jobs Cost broken down by Job Category. ServiceM8's own example puts Total Invoice Amount and Total Cost side by side, and the Smart Reporting Helper will build a report from a plain request such as average job cost per category.

The gap is the date range. ServiceM8 lists periods such as last month, this month, this year, last 3 months, last 12 months and year on year. None of them is an Australian financial quarter (July to September, October to December, and so on), and "last 3 months" is a moving window. You can export the report table to CSV, but you still have to check which dates it covered.

The export or API method for a real quarterly table

For a table with categories down the side and quarters across the top, pull the jobs yourself.

The simple route is the Job List export (Advanced Reporting Pack), a CSV of job details that can be segmented by category in Excel. ServiceM8 notes that CSV exports are text only and do not include all job data, so check it has the cost columns you need before building on it.

The reliable route is the ServiceM8 API. Each job record carries its category_uuid, completion_date and total_invoice_amount, and each job material line carries its cost, price and quantity. Pull Completed jobs by completion date, add up price and cost per job, then group by category and quarter. The API's filters support greater than and less than but not greater than or equal, so filter on the day before the quarter starts and the day after it ends. A script can run this on the first day of each quarter and drop the table into a spreadsheet.

If your categories also exist as Xero tracking categories, Xero's Profit and Loss report can be run by quarter and filtered by tracking category. See ServiceM8 Xero tracking categories for that setup.