Plumbers
Bookkeeping for plumbing contractors
Emergency calls, parts off the van, and a crew that changes every month. Three things that make plumbing books drift, and all three are fixable.
You price by urgency. Your books price by average.
A Sunday night sewer backup is not the same job as a Wednesday morning water heater, and you do not charge for it as if it were. After hours, weekend, holiday, emergency dispatch. Each carries a different rate for a different reason.
Then it all lands in the file as one line: income
You cannot tell whether the after-hours premium covers the cost of being available on a Sunday, because the overtime that answered the call is pooled with every other payroll hour that week. Priced right, emergency work is the most profitable thing in plumbing. Priced wrong, it is the fastest way to lose money. You are guessing which one you have.
Parts leave the van without a purchase order
New construction has paperwork. Fixtures get ordered against a PO and go where they were bought to go. Service does not. A tech pulls a fill valve, six feet of PEX and two fittings off the van and nobody writes anything down. Those parts were bought two months ago and coded to whatever job was open then. Multiply that by a year and the job costs in your file describe jobs that did not happen.
The crew is different every month
A sub for the rough-in, a helper for two weeks, a drain guy you use four times a year. Some are genuinely 1099-NEC contractors. Some are employees no matter what the two of you agreed, and the IRS and the Florida Department of Revenue both get a vote. Getting it wrong costs twice. Back taxes, then a workers’ comp audit that sweeps those payments onto your payroll at your highest class code. That is one of the five things construction books have to do that ordinary books never have to think about.
What changes in your file
Income split by how the work was sold
Standard service, after hours, emergency dispatch and new construction as separate income items, with the labour coded to match. The premium rates can then be checked against what they cost to deliver.
Job costing on everything, including the small stuff
A service call is a job. Ten minutes of coding on a $600 ticket buys you a real margin by call type, and it is what monthly bookkeeping delivers on service work as well as construction.
Van parts treated as stock
Material goes to a holding account and moves to the job that consumed it.
Every payee reviewed before the first check, not in January
Sub or employee, decided on how the work is actually controlled, with the W-9 collected up front rather than chased in December.
1099-NECs filed on time, and comp class codes coded as the payroll runs
So the audit is a formality. That is the whole of payroll and 1099 filing: classification first, then the filing that follows from it.
Retainage and progress billing on the construction side
Held-back money in its own account, and a WIP schedule showing costs to date against contract value.
Questions I get asked
How do I know if my drain guy is a 1099 or a W-2?
It comes down to control, not to what you call him or whether he sends an invoice. Who sets his hours, who supplies the truck and the tools, whether he works for anyone else, whether he can send somebody in his place. A guy who turns up when you say, in your van, on your jobs only, is an employee whether or not he wanted to be. I go through your payee list with you before it becomes an audit finding, and where it is genuinely close that is a question for a CPA.
Can you track parts that come off the van?
Yes, and it does not take a barcode scanner. Stock parts go to a holding account when you buy them and move to the job when they are used, off whatever your techs already write down.
Does my emergency work really need separate tracking?
It is the first thing I would set up. After-hours calls carry your highest rates and your most expensive hours, and pooled into one income line they tell you nothing. Split out, you can see whether the premium covers the overtime and the windshield time, or whether weekday work is subsidising Sunday nights.
Find out what your call types actually earn
Send me your QuickBooks file. I will tell you whether service, emergency and construction income can be separated out of what is already there, and what your 1099 exposure looks like before January.