One fleet, two ways to earn
Excavation is one of the few trades that routinely bills the same machine two different ways: hourly on time-and-material work for GCs and municipalities, lump-sum on quoted jobs like basements, septic systems, pools and site servicing. The two models fail differently. Hourly work fails on capture, hours that ran but never reached an invoice; lump-sum work fails on costing, a quote that met rock, water or unsuitable soils the estimate never priced. Books for an excavation contractor have to police both at once, on the same fleet, in the same month.
That is what our End-to-End Accounting service is built to do: bookkeeping, payroll, financial reporting and tax filing under one roof, with the chart of accounts and the job-cost structure designed around how an excavation company actually earns.
| What we watch | Per-hour work | Per-job work |
|---|---|---|
| What backs the invoice | Signed time tickets and hour-meter readings | The quote, plus priced and approved extras |
| Where margin leaks | Unbilled hours and free float moves | Rock, water, disposal and haul surprises |
| What the books must show | Billed hours against metered hours, by machine | Cost to date against quote, by job |
Float and mobilization: quoted, or eaten
Every low-bed move has a real cost, the permit, the driver and the truck's time in both directions, and whether that move was recovered should be a fact in the books, not a feeling in the yard. We set invoicing up so mobilization is its own line wherever the contract allows, and monthly reporting shows how many machine moves each job consumed against what it billed for them. A season of floating machines in for free is a margin decision, and it should be made on purpose by an owner looking at the number, not discovered at year-end.
Job costs that follow what the ground did
Cost codes on a dig follow the ground, not a generic template: machine hours by unit, trucking and tipping fees, imported granular, dewatering, shoring, and the extras a rock clause or a soils clause turns into billable work. Extras are the discipline point. The change gets priced, approved and invoiced while the pile is still on site, because collecting it after backfill is a different and worse conversation. On larger contracts, the 10% statutory holdback under the Construction Act sits in the books as its own receivable, so job margin and job cash never get confused and nobody treats held-back money as spendable.
The same ledger is what your filings later stand on. The T5018 slips builders file for what they paid you get matched by CRA against your reported revenue, and clean job records are what make that reconciliation a non-event when Corporate Tax Filing season arrives.
Invoices that survive a builder's payment cycle
Ontario's prompt-payment rules give a paid GC seven days to pay its subs, but the clock only runs on a proper invoice, so the paperwork is the leverage. Every hourly invoice goes out with its signed tickets attached, every extra with its approval, every disposal charge with its scale slips. Receivables get worked weekly by job, because an excavation sub's biggest single asset is usually money other people are holding.
The month-end heavy iron demands
Machine-heavy books fail in specific, predictable places, and month-end checks each one. Equipment loan payments get split into interest and principal instead of being expensed whole, the single most common error we untangle in self-kept books, and each machine carries its own depreciation schedule so the fleet's book value means something to a lender. Fuel gets split too: coloured diesel for the off-road machines is exempt from Ontario fuel tax and illegal in the licensed trucks, so a card statement that mixes both needs coding, not guessing. Operators run through payroll with WSIB premiums at construction rates and source deductions remitted on schedule.
The toolset stays deliberately simple: QuickBooks Online as the ledger, Dext catching fuel-card slips and parts receipts photographed from the cab, Plooto paying suppliers on terms. A one-machine owner-operator may not need all of that yet, which is what CPA Quick Support at $99/month is for: a CPA on call while it is still just you and the iron. Either way, we work with excavation and demolition contractors across Mississauga and the GTA, and every engagement is quoted in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call.
