Ask John™ Portal · MarginMap™
Know your margin
while the job
is still live.
MarginMap™ is the forecasting and margin tool inside the Ask John™ portal. Estimates turn into live jobs, and live jobs turn into a P&L — revenue collected, revenue outstanding, won value, estimated costs, open pipeline, close rate, and expected revenue — computed from the portal's own rows. No bank connection, no spreadsheet rebuild, no second set of books.
LIVE IN THE PORTAL — inside Ask John™How it works
Three steps, all from rows the shop already has.
Estimates move through their lifecycle — draft, sent, won, lost. Won work becomes the revenue base, and the open pipeline stays visible alongside it: everything quoted and not yet decided.
Invoices carry the money: paid invoices are revenue collected, sent invoices are revenue outstanding. The page reads them straight off the portal — nothing to reconcile by hand.
Margin on the jobs with derivable costs. Pipeline times your own close rate for expected revenue. One page, and the shop can see where the business stands before the month ends.
What it shows
The numbers a shop owner actually asks about.
- Revenue collected and outstanding — paid vs. sent invoices, summed from the portal.
- Won value — estimates that became jobs, including work whose costs are not derivable.
- Estimated direct cost and margin — from the estimator's own totals, on the costed jobs.
- Open pipeline — draft and sent estimates, still undecided.
- Close rate and expected revenue — won over won-plus-lost, applied to the pipeline for a forecast grounded in the shop's own record.
Why it's different
A forecast is only useful if it says what it knows — and what it does not.
Margins cover the costed subset only, and the page labels them ESTIMATED. Jobs without cost data still count in won value — they are simply excluded from the margin math, and the page says how many.
No bank connection, no import, no double entry. The forecast comes from the shop's own estimates, invoices, and close history — the record it already keeps.
Expected revenue is the open pipeline times the shop's own close rate — not an industry average, not a guess. When the close rate moves, the forecast moves with it.