Cost Pools take bulk-supply spend (concrete, mulch, drywall mud, anything you buy in bulk for multiple jobs) and split it across the jobs that actually consumed the supplies. Tag the receipt line to a pool. Admin-triggered. Reversible. The unallocated balance always stays in view.
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. Tag the receipt line to the pool, not a single job, and the spend spreads 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 an Eligibility rule: Manually tagged jobs, Catalog item match, or All active jobs. Pick a Weight rule: Hours on job, Catalog quantity, Catalog unit cost, Estimate value, or Equal split. Nothing to route receipts through. The pool fills itself from the receipt lines you tag to it.
When a bulk receipt comes in, set a category line's Job / Pool picker to the pool instead of a single job. That line becomes the pool's inflow. For a Catalog unit cost pool, enter the units you bought (e.g., 12 cu yd) so the engine can cost each job's actual consumption.
On the pool's detail page, click Allocation Preview to see the split before you commit, then Run Allocation. BD Project Tools adds each consuming job's share using your weight rule. The unconsumed remainder stays in the pool. Each run gets its own UUID so you can audit, compare, or reverse later. Optionally set a period so a run only pulls receipt lines in that window.
The unallocated balance tells you the truth about each pool: supply you bought but haven't spread to a job yet. Usually your eligibility rule is too narrow, or you haven't run the latest receipts. For a Catalog unit cost pool, a material gap flags the opposite: jobs consumed more than you bought. Click Reverse on any historical run to undo it 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 BD Project Tools-only.
| Platform | How Bulk Receipts Are Handled | Bulk Reallocation |
|---|---|---|
| Best Decision Project Tools | Tag a receipt line to a pool → admin-triggered allocation by hours / quantity / catalog unit cost / estimate value / equal split, with an unallocated-balance check 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, BD Project Tools 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 Best Decision Project Tools subscription. No add-on, no premium tier. Set up your first pool in the time it takes to write one estimate.
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