HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical: Why Your P&L Doesn't Match Reality
Most trades businesses can tell you what revenue did last month. Far fewer can tell you what profit looked like by job, by technician, or by service line.
That gap is where money disappears.
If you're running an HVAC, plumbing, or electrical company doing a few million in revenue, you've already outgrown the bookkeeping setup that got you here. The QuickBooks file that worked when you were a one-truck operation can't tell you what you need to know now: which jobs are actually profitable, which technicians produce margin, and whether your service agreements are subsidizing your install work or the other way around.
The bookkeeping issues that quietly cost trades operators money:
- Job costing is incomplete or wrong. Materials get tracked. Direct labor sometimes gets tracked. Vehicle costs, overhead allocation, callbacks, and warranty work usually don't. The "profitable" jobs on your P&L often aren't.
- Truck inventory isn't reconciled. Parts on trucks are inventory, not expense. When trucks aren't counted regularly, shrinkage hides in the materials line, and your margins look fine right up until they don't.
- Service vs. install mix isn't separated. These are different businesses with different margins, different sales cycles, and different working capital profiles. If they're combined in your books, you're flying blind on which one to grow.
- Service agreements aren't accounted for as recurring revenue. Maintenance contracts are the most valuable part of most trades businesses — buyers pay premiums for them. If they're not tracked properly, you can't price them right, can't measure renewal rates, and can't show their value at sale.
- Work in progress isn't tracked. Multi-day jobs that span month-end either get over-billed or under-recognized. Either way, your monthly financials become unreliable.
What it costs: bidding jobs too low, missing margin erosion until it's structural, and being unable to scale because you can't see what's working.
We help trades businesses build the bookkeeping infrastructure to actually run a multi-truck, multi-crew operation.