Electricians
Bookkeeping for electricians
Service work and new construction are two different businesses sharing one truck. Your books should tell you which one is paying for the other.
One P&L, two businesses, and no way to tell them apart
The service side runs on small tickets and fast money. A breaker here, a panel swap there, paid at the door or inside a week. Labour carries it.
The construction side runs on nothing like that
You bid a schedule of values, buy gear months ahead, bill progress against completion, and wait sixty days on work your crew finished in March. Then the GC holds retainage until the building closes out.
Pooled into one P&L, the bottom line describes neither
The combined number says you ran 18%. Neither side of your business ran 18%. Service is probably carrying a construction job that got away from you on labour, or a good tract job is hiding a service rate that has not moved in three years while copper has. You are bidding next year’s work off that blended number. The five things construction books have to do are true in every trade. This is how they bite in electrical.
Then there is the truck
Wire, breakers, devices and fittings get bought in bulk because bulk is cheaper. Most of it goes into the subdivision it was bought for. Some gets pulled off the van for a Tuesday service call, because the customer is standing there and the supply house is twenty minutes away. If the whole purchase was coded to the subdivision the day it was bought, that job now carries material it never used and the service call that ate it shows a margin that is not real. Do that for a year and every job cost in the file is wrong by an amount nobody can reconstruct.
What changes in your file
Service and construction split at the top
Two classes in one QuickBooks file, not two companies. A P&L for service, a P&L for construction, and the combined one your CPA needs, with overhead allocated instead of piled up. That split is what setting QuickBooks up properly is for: the classes and items that make it possible.
Job costing on every construction job
Labour, material, permits, rental and subs coded to the job as they happen. It is in the standard package here, not a tier above it, and it is what turns monthly bookkeeping into a job-costed P&L instead of a summary.
Truck stock handled as stock
Bulk material goes to a holding account when you buy it and moves to the job when it is consumed. The service call that used the wire carries the wire.
Progress billing and retainage kept honest
Billings tracked against the schedule of values, retainage in its own account, so you can see how much of your money is parked with a GC and for how long.
A WIP schedule on the construction side
Costs to date against contract value, so you know which jobs you have overbilled and which are quietly underwater. Ready the day a bonding agent asks.
1099-NEC tracking and comp class codes, through the year
The guys you bring in for a big pull get captured as you pay them, and service and construction payroll get coded to the right class. January is a filing, not a search, and the comp audit is arithmetic somebody already did.
Questions I get asked
Should service and new construction be two separate QuickBooks companies?
No. Two companies means two subscriptions, two bank feeds and a year-end consolidation you pay someone to do. One file with service and construction as classes gives you the same split, a combined P&L, and job costing underneath the construction side.
How do I track material that lives on the van?
The purchase goes to a holding account, not straight to a job, and moves to the job when it is used, off a van count or your field paperwork. A few minutes a month, and it is the difference between a job cost you can bid from and one you cannot.
Can service and construction be split out of the file I already have?
Usually, and without starting the year over. Material invoices and labour normally carry enough information to be coded back to the side of the business they belong to, which means the history you already paid to record becomes something you can bid from. The free file review is where that gets answered, and the rebuild itself is QuickBooks setup and training work.
Find out what your service work really makes
Send me your QuickBooks file. I will tell you whether service and construction can be split out of what is already in there, and what your job costs look like once they are. Usually it rebuilds without starting over.