The estimate is hours. The books keep the score.
Almost everything in a painting quote is labour: prep, masking, cutting, rolling or spraying, and the second coat that homeowners forget they agreed to. Materials are a real cost but rarely the reason a job loses money. Hours are. So the first thing we build is a job-level record where every timesheet hour lands on the job it belongs to, coded in QuickBooks Online projects, with the estimate from PaintScout or Jobber sitting beside it.
The comparison has to run at the loaded labour rate, not the wage. A painter's true hourly cost includes CPP, EI, vacation pay and WSIB premiums on top of what hits their bank account, and a quote built on the bare wage looks profitable right up until year-end. We compute the loaded rate for your crew, keep it current when wages move, and cost every job with it.
Reviewed weekly in season, quoted-versus-actual hours becomes an early-warning system: a job trending 20% over on day two can still be rescued, or at least explained, while the site super remembers why. Reviewed only at year-end, it is archaeology.
Paint at markup, sundries under control
Paint is the second discipline. Trade accounts at Benjamin Moore, Sherwin-Williams and Dulux bill on monthly statements, and a statement is where charge-throughs go to die: a few gallons picked up for a touch-up, never coded to a job, quietly absorbed into overhead. We match every supplier line to a job through Dext, so the materials on the invoice you send are the materials the job actually consumed.
Markup is a policy question the books have to enforce. If your quotes price paint at cost plus a markup, the job report should show that markup was actually captured, not eroded by an extra sheen upgrade nobody billed. Sundries, the tape, plastic, poly and roller sleeves that walk onto every site, either get priced into the estimate as a per-job allowance or tracked as a supplies rate, but never ignored, because on a repaint company doing hundreds of jobs a year they are a real number.
Four kinds of painting work, four billing patterns
A painting company rarely does just one kind of work, and each stream behaves differently in the books. The deposit on a booked residential job, for instance, sits as a liability until the crew starts, a treatment we use again when we turn the deposit ledger into a forecasting tool in our Fractional CFO work.
| Work stream | What changes in the books |
|---|---|
| Residential repaint, direct for the homeowner | Deposit on booking held as a liability, balance on completion, 13% HST on the invoice |
| New-build interiors as a sub for a builder | Invoices to the GC, a T5018 reported on you at year-end, sometimes a holdback on the final draw |
| Commercial and property-management repaints | PO numbers, net-30 or net-60 terms, receivables aging that needs a weekly look |
| Condo common-area contracts | Progress billing by phase, board approvals, paperwork the invoice must match |
Mixing these into one undifferentiated revenue line is how owners end up believing the commercial work carries the company when the homeowner repaints actually do, or the reverse. We tag every invoice by stream so the margin question has an answer.
Payroll for crews that grow and shrink
Painting crews expand for exterior season and contract after it, and some of the crew is paid piece rate per square foot rather than by the hour. Piece rate is still employment income when the relationship is employment: it runs through payroll, vacation pay accrues on top of it under Ontario's ESA, and WSIB premiums are calculated on it. We run all of that inside End-to-End Accounting, where bookkeeping, payroll, reporting and tax filing sit under one roof, so the hours that cost the jobs are the same hours that drive the T4s and the WSIB reporting.
Whether the people on your crew should be on payroll at all is the sharper question, and painting is a trade the CRA looks at closely. That one gets its own treatment on our painter tax services page rather than a paragraph here.
A monthly close you can price from
In season we close monthly: estimates reconciled to invoices, supplier statements matched to jobs, HST collected and paid tracked so the quarterly return is a non-event, and a one-page job report showing quoted hours, actual hours and margin by stream. Winter is for the year-end file and the pricing decisions the season's data now supports.
A solo repainter in Mississauga with no crew may not need any of that monthly machinery yet. For that stage, CPA Quick Support at $99 a month puts a CPA on call for quoting questions and CRA letters until the first crew makes real books worth it. Either way, the engagement starts with a free 15-minute call and a written quote.
