One repair order, two margins
Parts margin is a purchasing result: what your matrix adds to the jobber's cost, minus everything that leaks away through returned special orders, price-matched tires and warranty jobs that cap parts at cost plus a sliver. Labour margin is a rate result: the door rate against the loaded cost of a technician's hour, meaning wages plus CPP, EI, vacation pay and WSIB, not the number on the pay stub. The two move for unrelated reasons, so averaging them produces a gross profit line that explains nothing.
The chart of accounts carries the split from day one: labour revenue against tech labour cost, parts revenue against parts cost, tires on their own line because their thin unit margin would drag the parts number down, sublet work on its own line, and the shop supplies fee shown as the revenue it is. Every monthly statement then answers the question that matters: did the counter or the bays earn the profit, and is either one drifting?
Parts, cores and the jobber statement
The jobber's month-end statement is a payment document, not a bookkeeping system. We post from the delivery invoices, so each part lands on its repair order at the price actually paid that day. Just as important, the credits get matched: returned special orders, defective cores, stock rotations. Unmatched credits are the most common flaw in shop books, quietly overstating parts cost and understating margin all year.
Cores get their own treatment. The core charge on a remanufactured alternator is a refundable deposit, not revenue, and the credit when the old unit goes back is not income either. We carry cores as a receivable, so the shelf of dead parts by the back door appears in the books as the money it actually is. Inventory itself stays simple: most parts are special-ordered against tomorrow's appointments, so the count that matters is oil, filters, wipers, batteries and the tire rack, checked on a routine and priced at cost.
From the shop system to the statements
If the counter runs on Tekmetric, Shopmonkey or Mitchell 1, the books should start there, not in a re-typed spreadsheet. We map daily sales summaries into QuickBooks Online by line type, reconcile card batches and the cash drawer against the bank deposit, and let Dext capture the supplier invoices behind every input tax credit. Fleet and commercial accounts get a receivable aging of their own, because a dealer down the street on net-30 terms should never be blended with retail customers who pay at pickup.
Here is how each line of a repair order behaves once it reaches the books:
| Invoice line | What drives it | What the books must show |
|---|---|---|
| Labour | Door rate times billed hours | Margin over the loaded cost of a tech-hour |
| Parts | Matrix markup on jobber cost | Realized margin after returns and warranty caps |
| Tires | Thin unit margin, seasonal volume | Units and margin kept apart from parts |
| Sublet (alignments, machining, glass) | Your markup on someone else's work | A pass-through with its own margin line |
| Shop supplies fee | Percentage of labour, usually capped | Taxable revenue, never an expense offset |
Payroll, HST and the month-end package
Technician pay is its own discipline: hourly techs, flat-rate techs paid on booked hours, apprentices at scaled wages, and WSIB premiums across all of it. Our End-to-End Accounting service puts bookkeeping, payroll, financial reporting and tax filing under one roof, so wage runs, source deductions, T4s and records of employment come out of the same file as the margin reports, and flat-rate hours reconcile to the hours the shop system says were booked.
Everything a shop sells carries 13% HST, and almost everything it buys carries HST back as input tax credits, so the quarterly remittance is a calculation from real records, not a bank-balance guess. The finer points, like tax on the supplies fee and on warranty claims, live on our auto repair tax services page. At year-end the same books flow straight into the T2 through Corporate Tax Filing, with no clean-up bill in front of it. We work with garages across Mississauga and the GTA, and every engagement starts with a free 15-minute discovery call and a written quote.
