INDUSTRIES / HOME SERVICES
HVAC · Plumbing · Roofing · ElectricalSee which jobs and crews
actually make you money
You know your revenue. You probably know your gross margin. What most home service owners can't tell you is which service lines, which technicians and which types of call are carrying the business — and which ones are busy work that costs you money to perform.
Volume hides a
multitude of problems
Home services is a high-volume, thin-margin business, and that combination punishes small bookkeeping errors harder than almost any other trade. A few points of margin error across two thousand tickets a year is real money.
The most common failure is that ticket-level cost never makes it into the accounts. Your dispatch software knows what each job billed. Your books know what you spent in total. Nobody joins the two, so nobody can say whether the $180 drain call was profitable once you count the technician's hour, the drive time, the parts and the truck.
Parts inventory is the second one. Most home service businesses carry stock across several trucks and a shop, and most of them expense parts on purchase rather than tracking them. That overstates cost in the month you restock and understates it afterwards, which makes every monthly margin figure noise.
Then maintenance agreements. If you sell an annual plan for $240 and book all of it as revenue in January, your first quarter looks excellent and the rest of the year looks weak — and you're sitting on an obligation to perform work you've already spent the money for. It should be deferred and recognised as you deliver it.
Seasonality ties it together. HVAC lives or dies in July and January. Roofing follows the weather. Cash planning built on an annual average rather than last month's numbers is what keeps payroll comfortable in the quiet months.
What usually goes wrong
- No cost tracking at ticket or job level
- Parts expensed on purchase instead of tracked as inventory
- Maintenance agreement revenue recognised all at once
- Technician pay, spiffs and commissions not costed into jobs
- Truck and equipment costs never allocated to work
- Dispatch software and accounting never reconciled
- No cash plan for the slow season
Bookkeeping from $299/month · Cleanup from $200 per month behind
Built around how a
service business actually runs
From the truck to the P&L, with the numbers joined up in between.
Job-level profitability
Labor, parts, drive time and truck cost tagged to each job. Real margin by service line, by technician and by call type.
Technician payroll
Hourly, commission, spiffs and overtime handled correctly, then costed back to the jobs those technicians actually worked.
Parts & inventory
Truck stock and shop inventory tracked properly so COGS reflects what you used, not what you happened to buy that month.
Maintenance agreements
Deferred revenue handled correctly, so plan income is recognised as you deliver the visits rather than all in one month.
Software reconciliation
ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber and similar reconciled to your books, so both systems tell the same story.
Seasonal cash planning
Forecasting built on your annual pattern, so the slow months are planned for rather than survived.
You'll recognise this if...
None of these mean anything is broken. They mean the books were set up to satisfy a tax return rather than to run a business, which is the normal starting point.
Busy but flat
Call volume keeps climbing and the profit line doesn't move with it.
No margin by service
You couldn't say today whether drain cleaning makes more money per hour than installs.
Two systems, two answers
Your dispatch software and your accounting show different revenue and nobody reconciles them.
Winter is a worry
Every slow season is handled by tightening up rather than by a plan made months earlier.
What you'll be able
to see and decide
Within two months you'll know your margin by service line. Almost every owner we work with finds at least one surprise — often that a high-volume, low-ticket service is barely breaking even once drive time and technician cost are counted honestly.
You'll be able to compare technicians on profitability rather than revenue. Those are different numbers, and the gap between them tells you a lot about who to train, who to promote, and how to structure pay.
You'll know what a maintenance agreement is genuinely worth over its life, which is the number you need before deciding how hard to push them.
And you'll go into the slow season with a plan instead of a knot in your stomach. Knowing in September what January looks like is the difference between managing a quiet quarter and scrambling through one.
BOOK A FREE CALLEvery client gets
- Replies within 48 hours, guaranteed
- Books closed by the 15th, every month
- Flat monthly pricing, no hourly billing
- A plain-English summary with every report
- The same team every single month
- Cancel any time, files handed over cleanly
Home services accounting questions
We work alongside all the main dispatch platforms and reconcile them against QuickBooks Online monthly. The integrations are rarely as clean as advertised, and reconciling them is where most of the errors get caught.
Processed through payroll correctly and then costed back to the jobs they relate to, so job-level margin includes the true cost of the labor rather than just base wage.
Yes, if you want honest monthly numbers. Recognising a year of plan revenue in one month inflates that month and hollows out the rest. Deferring it also shows you the liability you're carrying to perform those visits.
It does. We price on your annual average transaction volume rather than your peak month, so you're not paying July rates in November.
Yes, if you want that granularity. Some owners find it more useful than technician-level reporting, particularly with two-person crews. We'll set the structure up around whatever decision you actually need to make.
Yes. Callbacks should be costed back to the original job rather than absorbed as general overhead, otherwise your job margins look better than they are and you never find out which work generates repeat visits.
Find out which work
is worth doing
Thirty minutes, no pitch. We'll look at your books, show you what job-level costing would reveal, and quote you a flat monthly price.
BOOK YOUR FREE CALL