A quote is a prediction, built from a walkthrough and your own assumptions about labour time. It's only once the contract is actually running that you find out whether the prediction was right. Most businesses never check — they quote the job, win it, and move on to the next one without ever comparing what they estimated to what actually happened on site.
This is a different question to How to Estimate Labour for a Commercial Cleaning Quote, which covers estimating before you quote. This article is about checking that estimate once the job is real.
Why the gap matters
A contract that looked profitable on paper can lose money quietly if actual labour hours consistently run higher than what you quoted. Because it happens gradually, visit after visit, it's easy to miss until you sit down and actually compare the numbers.
A 1.3-hour gap per visit doesn't sound dramatic on its own — but repeated across every visit for a year, it's the difference between a 29% margin and a 15% one. The job didn't change; the estimate was just wrong, and nobody checked.
What to actually track
You don't need a complex system — a simple log of actual hours per visit for the first month on a new contract tells you most of what you need to know. Compare that average against the hours you quoted, and you'll know quickly whether the estimate held up.
What a consistent gap usually means
If the gap traces back to the walkthrough, see Questions to Ask During a Commercial Cleaning Site Walkthrough — a lot of underestimated jobs come from a walkthrough that didn't surface something important rather than the actual cleaning taking longer than it should.
Re-running the numbers with real figures
Once you know your actual labour hours, run them back through the calculator in place of the original estimate to see your real margin — not the one you quoted, the one you're actually getting. That figure is what should inform whether the contract needs repricing.
Use the Free Quote & Profit Calculator to recalculate a contract with your actual labour hours.
Where this is headed
Saved job history and actual-vs-estimated tracking over time are capabilities being planned for a future paid version of Service Margin Lab — not available yet, but if it's something you'd want, the Early Access list near the bottom of the homepage is open.