Skilled trades bookkeeping: service calls, installs, and van inventory

Service and install are different businesses — book them that way

A blended statement hides the question that matters: is the money coming from service calls or from installs? The two lines carry different margins, different labour models, and different cash patterns, so we set them up as separate classes from the first month.

Installs behave like small construction jobs — quotes, deposits, equipment purchases, sometimes staged billing — and get costed per job: equipment, materials, labour hours, permits, subcontracted work. Service is a volume business where average ticket, callback rate, and unbilled hours decide the month. If you run ServiceTitan, Jobber, or Housecall Pro, we map its sync into QuickBooks Online and then reconcile it monthly, because field-software integrations drift and nobody notices until the HST return is wrong.

Flat-rate or time-and-materials: the books must match the pricing

Flat-rate pricing moves job risk from the customer to you, so the books have to measure the thing that now decides margin: actual hours against the hours the price book assumed. T&M shifts the risk back — and the failure mode becomes hours that never get billed and parts that go out the door without markup.

Either way, technician-level reporting matters. Two techs can run the same calls with very different sold-hour efficiency, and the books are where that difference shows up first — long before the reviews do.

Vans are rolling warehouses

The parts on your trucks are inventory, and expensing them the day the supplier invoice arrives makes stocking-up months look like losses and running-down months look like windfalls. We carry van and shop stock as inventory, relieve it to jobs as it is used, and true it up with periodic counts — which is also how shrinkage stops being invisible.

• PO discipline — every supplier invoice ties to a job or to stock, never to a vague materials account.
• Warranty parts — manufacturer credits are matched against the claim, so warranty work shows its real cost instead of polluting job margins.
• US-sourced equipment and parts — duty, brokerage, and FX belong in landed cost, and the import side is covered in our cross-border guide for trades companies.

Seasonal cash and maintenance-plan money you have not earned yet

Trades cash flow is a sawtooth: furnace season, AC season, and thin shoulder months in between. Two bookkeeping habits flatten it. First, install deposits are liabilities, not revenue — spending March deposits on February payroll is how spring starts underwater. Second, annual maintenance memberships collected up front are deferred revenue, recognized as the visits happen. That stops a strong selling month from masking a weak service month, and it quantifies the work you still owe your plan members.

Through the shoulder seasons we run a rolling 13-week cash view timed against HST remittances, payroll runs, and equipment-supplier terms — the quiet-month arithmetic most shops do on instinct, put on paper.

What month-end looks like for a trades shop

Each month we reconcile the field-software ledger to QuickBooks, match card payments taken in the driveway against invoices, update job costs on open installs, and refresh the service-versus-install split. You get a statement by line of business, a deferred-revenue balance for your maintenance plans, and a receivables list that separates homeowners from the builders and property managers who pay on terms. For the full shape of a monthly engagement, see our bookkeeping services page.

The bank balance tells you that you got through the month. The close tells you which half of the business carried you.