Cost Pools take bulk-supply receipts — concrete, mulch, drywall mud, anything you buy in bulk for multiple jobs — and reallocate the spend to the jobs that actually consumed the supplies. Admin-triggered. Reversible. Variance-tracked.
You buy concrete by the yard, mulch by the truckload, drywall mud by the pail. One trip. One receipt. And that supply ends up on five, eight, sometimes a dozen jobs that week.
Every other field tool in the category forces one receipt to one job. So you have two bad options. Pin the whole $1,200 mulch run to one job and lie about the cost distribution — that job's margin looks awful, the others look great, neither is real. Or split it manually in QBO after the fact, line by line, and hope you remember next week which yards went where.
Either way, job costing breaks. The CFO Dashboard shows margins you can't trust. The estimates you write on the next round of bids are calibrated to fiction. The owner stops looking at the numbers because the numbers don't match the work.
Cost Pools fix this at the source. The receipt goes to one place. The spend goes to every job that consumed it.
Set the pool up once. Run it whenever you need fresh allocations — weekly, after a big supply run, or before pulling a P&L report.
In Products & Services, flag the items you buy in bulk and set a Unit (cubic yards, bags, gallons — whatever you measure that item in). All items in a single pool must share the same unit, so concrete (yards) and mulch (yards) can co-exist, but concrete and drywall mud (pails) need separate pools.
Click + Create New Pool. Name it ("Concrete Q2", "Mulch Truck Tuesdays" — whatever you'll recognize). Pick a Holding Job — a catch-all that receives the supply receipts. Pick an Eligibility rule: Manually tagged jobs, Catalog item match, or All active jobs. Pick a Weight rule: Hours on job, Catalog quantity, Estimate value, or Equal split.
Open the pool's detail page. Link the Bulk-Purchased catalog items that feed this pool. For manual_tagged mode, link the Tagged jobs that should receive allocations. (Skip this step for catalog_items and all_jobs modes — eligibility is automatic.)
Optionally set a period — start and end date — so the engine only pulls receipts in that window. Click Run Allocation. BDB reallocates the holding-job spend across the eligible jobs using your weight rule. Each run gets its own UUID so you can audit, compare, or reverse later.
The Variance column tells you the truth about each pool. Positive variance = unallocated / under-absorbed (some spend didn't make it to a job — usually your eligibility rule is too narrow). Negative variance = over-allocated. Click Reverse on any historical run to undo that run cleanly — other runs are untouched.
Bulk-supply reallocation isn't a polish item — it's a category gap. Every competitor in the field service space forces receipt = single job. Cost Pools is BDB-only.
| Platform | How Bulk Receipts Are Handled | Bulk Reallocation |
|---|---|---|
| BDB Project Tools | Holding Job → admin-triggered allocation by hours / quantity / estimate value / equal split, with variance tracking and reverse | ✓ |
| Jobber | Receipt attaches to a single job; no reallocation engine | ✗ |
| Housecall Pro | HCP expense card lives on a single job; no reallocation engine | ✗ |
| ServiceTitan | POs and bills tied to one job; no reallocation across consuming jobs | ✗ |
| JobTread | Strong job costing, but each cost line still binds to one job | ✗ |
| Contractor Foreman | Expense entries are job-locked; no bulk reallocation | ✗ |
| FieldPulse | POs improve on Jobber/HCP but still single-job per receipt | ✗ |
Based on publicly documented features as of March 2026. If a competitor ships bulk-supply reallocation we'll update this page — for now, BDB is the only field tool that treats one bulk receipt as input to many jobs.
The questions owners and bookkeepers actually ask before they set up their first pool.
Cost Pools is included with every BDB Project Tools subscription — no add-on, no premium tier. Set up your first pool in the time it takes to write one estimate.
Founder's Pricing: $69/mo for 20 users. Retail $149/mo. All features included. Founder's rate locked when you sign up before June 30, 2026.