Calculator
The lost-variation calculator
Three questions, one uncomfortable number: how much work you're doing each year that never makes it onto an invoice. Adjust the sliders to match your business — the maths runs on your numbers, not ours.
Last updated 2026-07-11 · Reviewed by the TradieCue team
Illustrative arithmetic only — your jobs are your jobs, and nothing here is a guarantee of recovered revenue. The point of the exercise: undocumented extras are usually a bigger number than the cost of writing them down.
Why the third slider is the one that matters
Most tradies don't lose variations because customers refuse to pay. They lose them at the capture step: the extra is agreed verbally, the day rolls on, and by invoice time it's forgotten, half-remembered or too awkward to raise. The fix isn't better bookkeeping at the end of the month — it's a record that takes ten seconds to make while you're still standing in front of the work. That's what variation capture is for, and how to document extra work covers the practice behind it.
Common questions
Where do the calculator's default numbers come from?
They're deliberately conservative placeholders, not research findings — we don't publish invented statistics. Set the sliders from your own last few months of jobs; that's the only version of this number that means anything.
Does TradieCue guarantee I'll recover this amount?
No. The calculator shows what undocumented extras cost at the rates you enter. What TradieCue does is make the ten-second capture and the written variation easy enough to actually happen — the recovery still depends on your jobs and your customers.
Is my data sent anywhere when I use this?
No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser — nothing you enter leaves the page.
Try it on your next job
TradieCue is free to download on the App Store. Say a rough note about a real job and review the draft Timmy produces — nothing is sent until you share it yourself.
Free to download and try. TradieCue Pro is a subscription through Apple: A$24.99/month or A$239.99/year with a 30-day free trial. Apple confirms before any charge.