What Is a Job Card?
On a factory or workshop floor in India, every job that comes in usually gets a card that travels with it.
A job card is the document that records everything spent on one specific job: the labour hours, the materials used, and a share of overhead, totalled to give that job’s cost. It anchors job costing, and the hours on it feed straight into wages.
What the Card Records
Each card pulls together three cost blocks, then totals them. The labour block is the one that also touches payroll, since those hours are the same ones a worker gets paid for.
| Cost block | What it captures |
|---|---|
| Direct labour | Hours worked on the job at the hourly wage |
| Direct materials | Raw material drawn against the job |
| Overhead | A share of factory or workshop running cost |
| Total | The three blocks added together |
Job Card vs Timesheet
People treat these as the same sheet, but they count in different directions. A card follows one job and gathers every cost against it; a timesheet follows one person and logs their hours across jobs.
| Aspect | Card | Timesheet |
|---|---|---|
| Follows | A single job or work order | A single employee |
| Records | Labour, materials, overhead | Hours worked, by day |
| Used for | Job costing and pricing | Attendance and payroll |
Job Card Example
Here is an illustrative example. The job number and figures are invented to show the format, not taken from a real card.
Say an auto-parts workshop in Ludhiana takes a job to recondition a batch of pump housings, logged as Job No. JC-2048. The card records 14 labour hours at Rs.112 an hour, Rs.3,650 of direct materials, and Rs.1,400 of workshop overhead.
| Cost element | Amount |
|---|---|
| Direct labour (14 hrs x Rs.112) | Rs.1,568 |
| Direct materials | Rs.3,650 |
| Workshop overhead | Rs.1,400 |
| Total | Rs.6,618 |
Those 14 hours do double duty: they cost the job and they pay the worker.
Costing, Wages, and the Muster Roll
The card is where a business finds out whether a job actually made money. Total it against what the customer paid, and the margin on that job is right there, before it disappears into a monthly average.
There is a compliance side too. The Factories Act, 1948 requires a muster roll of the hours and wages of every worker, and the labour hours on the card are the same figures that record needs. Reliable cards also surface idle time between jobs, where a lot of hidden labour cost sits.
Let the Software Track the Hours
The weak link on any card is the labour line, because hand-written hours drift. Attendo (formerly Petpooja Payroll) captures each worker’s attendance through biometric or geo-tagged punches, so the hours behind the card are recorded rather than guessed, and the same data flows into wages. A staff shift schedule template gives you a starting point for who works which job, and a free work hours calculator helps you sanity-check the labour line before it hits payroll.
Across 40,000+ Attendo clients, the pattern we see is that labour hours, not material prices, are where job costs quietly leak.
Frequently Asked Questions
No, and this trips people up. The MGNREGA version is a government document issued to a rural household under the MGNREGA scheme, guaranteeing days of paid work. A workplace card is an internal costing and labour record for one job. Same name, unrelated purposes.
In most factories they are the same thing, the card that gathers a job’s labour, materials, and overhead. Some shops keep a shop-floor copy the worker fills in and an accounts copy that totals it.
Not by that name. The Factories Act, 1948 does require a muster roll of hours and wages, and the card helps produce those figures. It is missing records, rather than the card itself, that lands a business in trouble during an inspection.
The hours logged against each job are the same hours the worker is paid for. So a clean card doubles as a source for wage calculation and as a way to spot idle time between jobs.
