Two businesses, one truck fleet
Good HVAC books start by refusing to blend installs and service. Install revenue is lumpy: a few large invoices a week, driven by close rate and equipment cost, with the furnace, AC or heat pump as the biggest line on the job. Service is the opposite: dozens of small tickets built from diagnostic fees, parts markup and billed hours. They rise and fall on different rhythms and fail in different ways, so the chart of accounts keeps them apart from the first entry.
In practice that means separate revenue and cost-of-sales accounts for installs, service and plan work, with equipment, parts and direct labour mapped to each. A blended gross margin looks healthy right up until it hides install margin sliding two points a quarter because supplier prices moved and the quote template did not. Split books surface that within a month, not at year-end. Distributor volume rebates and co-op credits belong against equipment cost too, or install margin quietly flatters itself.
Maintenance plans: cash now, revenue later
Plan money collected upfront is a liability until the visits happen. Whether members pay a year at a time or monthly by card, the books carry deferred revenue and release it as the term or the covered visits run off. The bank balance is not the score.
| Moment | What the books do |
|---|---|
| A member pays a year upfront | Cash up, deferred-revenue liability up. The income statement shows nothing yet. |
| The HST return for that period | 13% is due on the payment when collected, even though the revenue is unearned. |
| Each covered month or visit passes | A slice moves from liability to earned plan revenue. |
| Year-end with unserved months left | The balance stays a liability, and a matching tax reserve keeps it out of taxable income until earned. |
Run this properly and the plan book becomes the most valuable page in the file: a recurring-revenue base with a renewal rate you can actually read, which lenders and eventual buyers notice. Run it as deposit-and-forget and it overstates this year, understates next year, and leaves HST questions sitting in a liability that was never booked.
From dispatch board to trial balance
The field software is the source of truth for jobs, and the accounting should receive it cleanly rather than fight it. We work with ServiceTitan, Jobber and FieldEdge feeding QuickBooks Online, with Dext capturing supplier invoices from Wolseley, Noble or Master so equipment cost lands on the job that consumed it, and Plooto paying the bills on schedule.
- Consumer-financing payouts. A Financeit-funded install deposits net of the dealer fee. The books need gross revenue and a financing-fee expense, or per-job margin is fiction.
- Truck stock. Parts riding around on six vans are inventory. A simple count discipline keeps cost of sales honest without turning techs into warehouse clerks.
- Holdbacks when you sub on builds. New-construction mechanical work carries the Construction Act's 10% holdback. We track holdback receivables on their own line, because the revenue is real and the cash is months away.
- T5018 in both directions. You report the subcontractors you pay; the GCs you work for report you. Books that reconcile to those slips end CRA matching letters at the first reply.
Payroll, WSIB and a month-end you will actually read
Techs, apprentices and heat-wave overtime run through payroll inside End-to-End Accounting: bookkeeping, payroll, financial reporting and tax filing under one roof. WSIB premiums are remitted from real payroll numbers, and clearance certificates stay current for the GTA builders who check before your crew gets on site.
The month-end pack stays short on purpose: install margin, service margin, plan count and renewal rate, the deferred-revenue balance, and receivables with holdbacks flagged. July gets compared to last July, because comparing it to June tells you about the weather, not the business. When the numbers raise a bigger question, like whether a second install crew would pay for itself, that is Fractional CFO territory, and these books are already shaped for it.
Where the tax file plugs in
Because the same team keeps the books and files the returns, year-end is an output, not a project. The reserve on unearned plan revenue is claimed from balances we already trust, holdback timing carries straight into the corporate tax filing, and the rebate and warranty oddities that make HVAC returns interesting are handled as routine rather than discovered in March. Clean segments all year also mean that when you eventually price the business, or a lender prices you, nobody has to guess which half earned the profit.
