Item Profitability

What it is

Item Profitability answers one question: for each thing you sell, is it actually making you money? The page takes every item in your Price Book, adds up what you charged for it and what it cost you, and puts the two side by side with the profit, the markup and the margin worked out for you.

You open it from the left menu: Reports›Item Profitability. It also has a card called Item Profitability on the main Reports page. The heading at the top of the page reads "Track revenue, cost, markup, and margin for items sold from the Price Book."

There is one control on the page — a drop-down labelled View — and it changes which money the report counts.

In practice this is a computer report. The phone menu (More›Reports & Payments) lists Commission Report, Lead Report, Time Tracking Report and Payments — Item Profitability is not one of them, and the table is fourteen columns wide.

When to use it

• Working out which services and parts are worth pushing, and which are barely paying for themselves.
• Finding items you are selling at, or below, what they cost you.
• Checking whether a price rise actually stuck — quote a month, then compare the margin.
• Preparing for a supplier conversation: you can see exactly how much of that part you sold and what it earned.
• Deciding what goes into a promotion, and what definitely should not.
• Seeing the gap between what you quote and what you get paid, by flipping between the three views.

Use Lead Reports instead when you want money by job, by customer or by date range. Use the Commission Report for what you owe your field workers, and Payments for the money actually collected. The Reports Overview guide compares all of them.

Before you start

• Your role needs Reports access. An owner or admin turns it on under Settings›Team Roles, in the Reports & Billing group, with the switch called Reports. Without it the menu item is hidden and typing the address in simply moves you to another page.
• Your work has to be priced from the Price Book. Only lines that were added with the Add from Price Book button appear here. A line somebody typed by hand onto an estimate has no item behind it, so it is skipped — as are section headings.
• Your items need a cost filled in. Go to Settings›Quotes & Docs›Estimate Settings, open the Price Book tab, then Add item (or the pencil on an existing one) and fill in Your cost (internal). Leave it empty and this report treats the cost as zero.
• Fill the cost in before the estimate is written, not after. Because the report uses the cost that was saved onto the document at the time, adding a cost to the Price Book today only improves the estimates and invoices you write from now on.
• Only the owner and admins can see or set that cost box in the Price Book. Everyone who can open this report, however, sees your costs and margins — so hand out the Reports permission with that in mind.
• Your company may use different words. "Lead" can be renamed for your account, so the view called Closed Leads and the column called Paid Leads may read "Closed Jobs" and "Paid Jobs" on your screen.

Step-by-step

Open the report and read the headline

1. Click Reports in the left menu to open that group, then Item Profitability.
2. Wait for Loading… to finish. Everything on the page is worked out from your own estimates and invoices, so a busy account takes a moment.
3. Read the four cards along the top. They are the totals for the whole list: the revenue for the view you are in, Cost, Profit and Margin.
4. The table below is sorted with the biggest earner first, and the last row is a bold Total line.

Choose the right view

1. Find the View drop-down at the top right of the Price Book Items card.
2. Pick one of Quoted Estimates, Closed Leads or Paid Revenue.
3. Check the small grey line under Price Book Items — it changes to explain the view you just picked.
4. Notice the two column headings that rename themselves: the quantity column becomes Qty Quoted, Qty Completed or Qty Sold, and the money column becomes Quoted Amount, Closed Revenue or Paid Revenue.

Read one row properly

1. Find the item by name in the first column. Its SKU, Type, Category and Unit sit next to it, exactly as you set them in the Price Book.
2. The quantity column tells you how many you moved, counted in that item's unit — 12 "each", or 40 "hour".
3. Cost is the quantity multiplied by the cost saved on each document. Profit is the revenue minus that cost.
4. Avg Markup is the profit as a percentage of your cost — how much you add on top. Margin is the profit as a percentage of the price — how much of the customer's money you keep.
5. The last three columns, Estimates, Invoices and Paid Leads, tell you how often the item appears and how far down the line it got.

Hunt for the items that are losing you money

1. Switch the View to Paid Revenue — real money, not hopeful money.
2. Read down the Margin column. Anything near 0.0%, or negative, is being sold at or below cost.
3. Treat a margin of exactly 100.0% as a warning, not a win — it almost always means nobody filled in a cost for that item.
4. Flip to Quoted Estimates and compare. An item quoted constantly but rarely paid for is priced wrong or sold badly.
5. Fix the item back in Settings›Quotes & Docs›Estimate Settings›Price Book, then check again after a few weeks of new estimates.

Take the figures away with you

1. Set the View you want first — the export follows it.
2. Click Export CSV, next to the View drop-down.
3. The file downloads to your computer named after the view and today's date, for example item-profitability-paid-2026-08-09.csv.
4. Open it in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets. Every column is there, plus the Total row at the bottom.
5. Repeat for each view if you want to compare quoted against paid side by side.

How to check it worked

• The page loaded: the spinning Loading… line is replaced by the four cards and a table of items.
• The view changed: the description under Price Book Items changes, the two renaming column headings change with it, and the numbers move.
• Your costs are being counted: the Cost card at the top is not $0.00, and the Margin card is a believable number rather than 100.0%.
• A new item is showing up: put it on an estimate, then reload this page — it appears in Quoted Estimates straight away. It only reaches Closed Leads once that estimate is signed, and Paid Revenue once its invoice is paid in full.
• The export worked: a file called item-profitability-…csv lands in your downloads, and the bottom row of the spreadsheet reads Total with the same figures as the cards.
• Nothing to show: you get No items to report yet with a line telling you what is missing — "Add price book items to an estimate and they'll show up here", "Once a customer signs an estimate, the items on it will show up here", or "Once an invoice is fully paid, its items will show up here", depending on the view. Export CSV is greyed out while that message is on screen.

Common mistakes

• Expecting a date range. There is no date filter, no search box and no category filter on this page — it always covers everything in your account, from the first estimate you ever wrote. If you need "last quarter", export and slice it in a spreadsheet.
• Looking for a part-paid job in Paid Revenue. Only invoices marked Paid or Fully Paid count. Partially Paid, Sent and Overdue invoices are not in there, so a deposit you have banked will not show up until the job is settled.
• Expecting items from a job's Items tab. Items added on the Items tab of a job are a working list, not a document. They reach this report only once they are on an estimate or an invoice — the Create estimate from these items button on that tab is the quick way to move them across.
• Wondering why a signed job is missing from Closed Leads. That view counts estimates the customer actually signed. An estimate you moved to a "won" status by hand, without a signature on it, will not appear.
• Seeing "(deleted item)". The work is still counted, but the item behind it has been removed from the Price Book, so there is no name, SKU or category left to show. Archive items you no longer sell instead of deleting them and your history stays readable.
• Trying to sort or click a row. The rows are fixed in order of revenue, biggest first, and nothing on the table is clickable. Export to a spreadsheet if you want it ordered by margin.