Accounting for HVAC, plumbing, and electrical contractors that costs the ticket, not the month.

Because the economics of HVAC, plumbing, and electrical service work happen at the level of the individual service call, and generic bookkeeping records the month. The unit that matters is the ticket, and the margin on a ticket is decided by its parts-versus-labor split — a parts-heavy replacement and a labor-heavy diagnostic can post identical revenue and earn completely different margins, yet a standard P&L lumps them into one revenue line and one cost line. On top of that, maintenance and service agreements are cash collected up front for work owed later (deferred revenue, not income on collection), consumer financing on big-ticket replacements funds the contractor net of a dealer fee that gets buried when it’s netted into revenue, and the field-service-management platform where the jobs actually live has to reconcile cleanly back to QuickBooks every month. None of that is handled by generic bookkeeping that simply categorizes bank transactions.

We configure QuickBooks — chart of accounts, items, and class or service-item structure — so each service call carries its true parts cost, its loaded labor cost, and the resulting margin, rather than just a total invoice amount. When the FSM platform records a ticket, the reconciliation into QuickBooks preserves that split so the call shows what it actually earned after the parts that went into it and the technician time it consumed. Those ticket margins then roll up by trade and by technician, which is what makes flat-rate pricing, technician pay, and the decision of which call types to chase rest on real numbers. The point is that “the shop was profitable this month” can be true while a meaningful share of individual calls and one or two trucks quietly lose money — ticket-level job costing is how that becomes visible.

As deferred revenue. When a customer pays up front for a seasonal HVAC maintenance membership, a plumbing inspection plan, or an electrical safety agreement, the cash is a liability on the balance sheet, not income — the contractor still owes the visits or the access period. Revenue is recognized as the visits are delivered or ratably across the access period, whichever matches what was promised. Most bookkeeping records the whole payment as revenue on the day it’s collected, which overstates the month, hides the liability for unfulfilled visits, and makes a membership-growth push look more profitable than the cash supports — until renewals slow and the mismatch reverses. We set up the deferred revenue account, post recognition on a regular schedule, and maintain an agreement-level liability schedule so the owner sees exactly what future service is owed. We don’t set the tax treatment of the deferral — that determination stays with your CPA or EA.

Financing is common on big-ticket replacements — a full HVAC system, a service-panel upgrade, a water heater, a repipe or sewer line. When a customer finances a job through a partner such as GreenSky or Synchrony, the customer signs the loan, the finance company funds the contractor (typically within a few business days) at roughly 88–95% of ticket, and the 5–12% dealer fee is the contractor’s cost of offering financing. The correct accounting records the full ticket as revenue, the dealer fee as its own expense line (never netted against revenue, which hides both the revenue and the cost), and the funded amount as the cash received, with the deposit matched back to the original job. Longer zero-interest promotional periods can carry additional accrual nuance. We reconcile the finance partner’s statements monthly and report dealer-fee as a percentage of financed revenue so the owner can see what the financing program actually costs — which is often the difference between a healthy install margin and a thin one.

Yes. The field-service-management platform — ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Service Fusion, FieldEdge — is the operational source of truth for a trade shop: dispatch, customer history, invoicing, payment processing, technician performance. The connection to QuickBooks is best handled through monthly summary-level reconciliation rather than dumping every transaction into the ledger, since the job-level detail belongs in the FSM platform. Each month we tie FSM revenue to bank deposits, reconcile financing splits to the finance partner’s statements, match sales-tax accruals, and age customer balances appropriately. The FSM stays the operational system and QuickBooks stays the financial general ledger; the reconciliation discipline between the two is what makes the books reliable. We work with whichever FSM platform you run, as long as it exports clean job and payment data.

We keep the records that support certified-payroll and prevailing-wage compliance — the wage, job-classification, and fringe-benefit detail by worker and by job that a certified-payroll report draws on — and we structure payroll and job costing so that public-work hours are tracked separately from ordinary service work. What we do not do is make the legal determination of which wage determination applies, certify the reports, or file them on your behalf: that compliance responsibility, and the relationship with the awarding authority, stays with you as the contractor. In practice we work alongside your payroll provider and, where appropriate, your prevailing-wage or compliance specialist so the underlying records are clean and defensible, and we coordinate with your CPA on any tax aspects. The division of labor is deliberate — we own the recordkeeping; the legal determination and filing stay with the client and the authority.

Engagements are priced as a fixed monthly fee against a written scope — no hourly billing — with the fee driven by your trade, technician and truck count, agreement volume, financing volume, FSM platform, and whether you do prevailing-wage work. Our canonical ranges apply: monthly engagements generally run $500–$2,500+ per month, and a one-time cleanup to restate agreement revenue, un-net buried dealer fees, and rebuild per-ticket costing generally runs $1,200–$15,000+, depending on the condition and volume of the file. Your exact figure is set in writing after the discovery call — we don’t quote trade-specific prices sight unseen. See pricing for the full picture. We do not file income taxes or set tax treatment; we keep your books accurate and CPA-ready and coordinate with your CPA or EA, who files.