One ledger, four kinds of work
Survey revenue does not arrive one way. A residential SRPR is quoted, delivered and paid inside a month. A reference plan for a severance bills when the plan is deposited. A draft plan of subdivision earns fees for years, on a schedule the developer's approvals dictate. Construction layout bills by the site visit for as long as the build runs. Books that pour all of that into one revenue line cannot tell you which work carried the firm and which work quietly subsidized a client.
| Work type | How it bills | What the books must hold |
|---|---|---|
| SRPR | Fixed fee, often collected up front | The prepayment as a liability until the report is delivered |
| Reference plan for a severance | Retainer, balance at plan deposit | Registry and research disbursements recovered on the final bill |
| Plan of subdivision | Milestones from draft approval to registration, sometimes with retainage | Unbilled work between milestones; retainage aged on its own line |
| Construction layout | Per visit or per unit through the build | Unbilled site visits swept into every invoice run |
Our End-to-End Accounting service keeps each file as its own small project in QuickBooks Online, costed in crew-days rather than abstract hours, because a crew-day is how the work is actually scheduled and what it actually costs: the party chief, the instrument operator, the truck and the gear, all rolling out of the yard together.
Developer files earn for years before they finish
The subdivision file is where survey books most often go wrong. Field work front-loads into the first season; fees release at draft-plan approval, at clearance of conditions, at registration; and a slice may sit held back until the last condition clears. Recognizing revenue only when a milestone bills makes the firm look broke through heavy field months and rich through paperwork months, and neither picture is true.
So every month we post the unbilled crew time sitting in open files as work in progress, and we keep retainage in its own receivable account, aged against each file's approval timetable rather than 30-day terms, because a developer's holdback does not respond to a statement run. This is more than management hygiene. Unbilled work is taxable income for a survey corporation at year-end, so a WIP figure maintained monthly turns the touchiest number on the corporate tax return into a lookup instead of a March reconstruction.
Disbursements go out the door; HST comes back in
A boundary file collects costs at the land registry before it earns a dollar: title searches, copies of deposited plans and field notes, registration fees paid through ONLAND. Each charge gets coded to its file the day it is paid, so it reaches the client's final bill instead of dying in overhead. Whether it is re-billed with 13% HST depends on whether the firm incurred it as the client's agent, and we keep that split live in the chart of accounts all year rather than sorting receipts at return time.
The other direction matters just as much. Survey fees are fully taxable, which means full input tax credits on instruments, software, fuel and truck repairs, but only when the paper is captured. Dext collects crew receipts from the road, Plooto pays suppliers on approval, and the HST return files from a reconciled ledger instead of bank totals. The instruments themselves live in a capital schedule we maintain alongside the books, which is what makes the fleet's tax treatment routine at filing time.
Payroll that breathes with the field season
A crew payroll is not an office payroll. Party chiefs and instrument operators stack overtime from spring to freeze-up, summer field assistants arrive and leave with records of employment, and winter shifts the same people toward drafting and plan production on different hours. We run payroll inside the same engagement, so field wages post to the files the crew actually stood on, source deductions follow the seasonal swings, and the Employer Health Tax is on the radar before Ontario payroll crosses the $1 million exemption. Contract drone pilots and freelance drafting help get flagged for T4A reporting from their first invoice, not discovered in February.
A month-end the managing OLS can read
Each month closes into one short pack: margin by file in crew-days, work in progress by file, retainage and ordinary receivables aged separately, and cash held against the next remittance. Ten minutes with it tells you which files are running past their quoted field days, which developer needs a call, and whether the winter bench is funded. When those numbers need to become pricing and capacity decisions, our CFO work builds on the same ledger without re-keying anything.
We run this for survey practices from our Mississauga office across the GTA. The first month usually includes rebuilding per-file history so cost-to-date starts true, and scope is quoted in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call, so there are no hourly surprises.
