Well I feel better as it's starting to make more sense to me.
The cost is what it will be to send the available people on the task, the reward is what the characters would pay when it's collected and ti's not a BONUS on top of the character payout. The reward does not include your multiplier..
I do like one thing about it, it's nice to put everyone on jobs and it will tell you how many are on each length task and give you the total of your reward so you have an idea how much you are making.
If it's going to cost me 11K to put all my characters on a 24 hours task and so I lose that when I collect, I think i'll just do it individually like I have been so i get to keep all my dough. I only have 5.5 million and still need to buy Level 58 stuff, plus a bunch of land.