Truck stock treated as an expense at purchase
Parts bought in bulk hit one month and get installed across the next three. Tracking material to the job it was used on smooths the distortion and shows the real cost of each call.
HVAC & Plumbing Contractors
Bookkeeping for HVAC & Plumbing Contractors
Service calls and installs are two different businesses sharing one bank account. Your books should tell them apart.
Most HVAC and plumbing shops run a high-volume service side and a lower-volume, higher-ticket install side. Blended together, a strong install season can hide a service department that loses money on every truck roll, or vice versa.
We set up class or department tracking so service, install, and maintenance agreements each carry their own revenue and cost. Then we allocate labor, truck stock, and callbacks to the right side of the house.
What goes wrong
Where hvac & plumbing margin usually leaks.
Warranty and callback labor invisible
Return trips are free to the customer and expensive to you. Coding callback hours separately shows what rework is costing per technician and per install type.
Maintenance agreements booked as revenue on day one
An annual plan collected upfront is unearned until visits are performed. Recognizing it across the term keeps monthly margin from swinging wildly.
Field software and accounting drifting apart
Invoices in the dispatch system that never reconcile to deposits are the most common source of unexplained revenue gaps. We reconcile the two monthly.
What we track for you
- Service vs. install vs. maintenance agreement revenue and cost
- Technician labor hours with burden allocated to calls and installs
- Truck stock and material consumption by job
- Callback and warranty labor as its own cost category
- Deferred revenue on prepaid maintenance agreements
- Equipment purchases and manufacturer rebates
Your cost structure
- Technician labor
- Loaded hourly cost including taxes, comp, and drive time, so the true cost of a service hour is visible against what you bill for it.
- Truck stock and materials
- Bulk purchases tracked and relieved as parts are consumed on calls, instead of spiking cost in the purchase month.
- Vehicles
- Fuel, maintenance, insurance, and payments grouped per truck so the cost of putting each vehicle on the road is a number, not a guess.
- Equipment and rebates
- Installed equipment costs matched to the job, with manufacturer rebates and spiffs recorded against the correct install rather than as loose income.
What lands in your monthly report
- Profit and loss by department: service, install, maintenance
- Gross margin per install job
- Callback and warranty cost trend
- Deferred maintenance-agreement revenue balance
- Vehicle cost summary
HVAC & Plumbing questions
See the full monthly plans and pricing, or read how the onboarding process works.
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Other trades we work with
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