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Moving company bookkeeping: profit per move, not per month
A moving company's month is only the sum of its moves, so the books should cost every job — crew hours, truck and fuel, materials, sub fees — and show what each one actually earned. Around that core sit three habits movers skip at their peril: deposits held as liabilities, a reserve for damage claims, and storage revenue recognized on its own monthly clock.
By the AnalytIQ Accounting team · Last reviewed: August 12, 2026
Cost every move like the job it is
Each move gets a job card in the books: crew hours including travel and load time, the truck's running cost and fuel, packing materials consumed, valuation coverage, and any agent or subcontractor share on interlined jobs. Compare that to the invoice and you have contribution per move — which crews protect margin, which lanes pay, and where the estimate went wrong. Local hourly work and long-distance jobs priced by weight and distance fail differently: hourly jobs leak through unbilled hours, tariffed jobs leak through bad estimates, and only per-job costing shows which leak you have.
Materials deserve their own small discipline. Boxes, wrap, and mattress bags are sold on some jobs and consumed on others, so a periodic count keeps the materials margin honest instead of drifting into the fuel line. Trucks get per-unit treatment as well — fuel, repairs, insurance, and capital cost allowance tracked by vehicle — so the aging five-ton that eats its own margin is identified before replacement season, not during it.
Deposits are liabilities; summer pays for winter
A booking deposit is not revenue — it is a customer liability until the truck rolls, and refunds or reschedules adjust that ledger rather than eroding a revenue figure you already reported. Kept clean, the deposit account doubles as an operational report: the value of booked-but-unperformed work on the calendar. It also stops a deposit-heavy month from flattering the bank balance into spending decisions the summer has not earned yet.
Seasonality makes the split matter. The late-spring-to-early-fall peak carries most of the year, so books that separate earned revenue from booked deposits let you read a January statement calmly — and price the peak knowing what the slow months actually cost to survive.
Reserve for claims before the phone rings
Damage claims are a normal cost of moving furniture, and the books should treat them that way instead of absorbing each one as a shock. Contracts typically limit released liability to about 60 cents per pound per article unless the customer buys full-value protection, so the exposure on any job is estimable. We accrue a claims reserve against each period's revenue based on your own claims history, and track every claim by job and by crew.
The by-crew view is the operational payoff: claims cluster, and a clustering pattern is training data your claims ledger can hand you. Coverage upgrades sold on the truck are revenue matched against the same reserve, which keeps the valuation program honest as a product rather than found money.
Storage runs on a different clock
Move revenue is earned on delivery; storage is earned month by month for as long as the goods sit. Mixing the two turns the books into a guess about both.
| Revenue stream | Earned when | Bookkeeping treatment |
|---|---|---|
| Local moves, hourly | Day of the move | Invoice on completion, deposit applied against it |
| Long-distance moves | On delivery | Loaded but undelivered at month end is WIP, not revenue |
| Packing materials | When supplied | Product margin line supported by periodic counts |
| Storage-in-transit | Over the days held | Billed within the move file, short-term by design |
| Long-term storage | Each month of the term | Recurring billing, prepaid periods deferred |
| Valuation coverage | With the move | Revenue matched against the claims reserve |
Recurring storage is also the easiest revenue to leak — vaults occupied by customers who fell off the invoice run. We reconcile the vault or unit count to the billing list every month, because an unbilled vault is rent you are paying your own warehouse.
HST, cross-border moves, and the close
Domestic moving and storage charges are taxable, and the input tax credits on trucks, fuel, and materials are captured monthly so the GST34 is funded from clean numbers. A move with an origin or destination outside Canada is generally zero-rated as a freight transportation service — no HST on the invoice, your credits intact — a distinction worth getting right before quoting US work, not after.
Cross-border jobs bring more than a tax code: US DOT operating authority, fuel taxes on American miles, and USD invoicing all change the paperwork, and we cover them in our cross-border tax guide for moving companies. Behind it all runs a normal disciplined close — payroll for crews tied out with WSIB, banks reconciled, receipts captured through Dext into QuickBooks Online — described on our bookkeeping services page.
Common questions.
When does a customer deposit become revenue?
On the day the move is performed. Until then it sits as a liability, so cancellations and reschedules adjust the deposit ledger — and the account balance doubles as a report of booked work still on the calendar.
How should damage claims show up in the books?
As an accrued claims reserve charged against each period's revenue, sized from your claims history, with individual claims tracked by job and crew. The reserve smooths the cost; the by-crew detail tells you where to train.
Do we charge HST on a move to the United States?
Generally no — a household move with an origin or destination outside Canada is zero-rated as a freight transportation service, and you still keep your input tax credits. Domestic moves and storage remain fully taxable.
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