Cost the tonne before you judge the job
Hot-mix leaves the plant priced per tonne, trucking bills per load or per hour, and the customer pays per job or per square metre. Books that only report whether the month made money cannot tell you which of those conversions leaked. So we structure paving books to produce two figures that must reconcile: cost per tonne laid, by crew and by month, and margin per job, after materials, trucking, labour and equipment time.
In practice, every scale ticket, haul invoice and crew day lands against a job in QuickBooks Online, with Dext capturing the paper from the plant window and the fuel pump. The per-tonne view exposes a crew that laid light or a plant price that crept between quotes. The per-job view exposes the lowball estimate. Each number hides exactly what the other shows, which is why you need both.
| View | What it answers | What it hides |
|---|---|---|
| Margin per job | Did this driveway or contract make money after materials, trucking and labour? | Whether the crew or the quote caused a miss |
| Cost per tonne laid | What buying, hauling and laying one tonne costs your operation, crew by crew | Job-level pricing errors and scope creep |
| Both, reconciled monthly | Which work to re-price or walk away from next season | Very little, which is the point |
The iron has to be in the number too. A paver, a roller and the float moves that shuttle them are real costs of every tonne, so we set an internal equipment rate per machine hour, built from financing, insurance, maintenance and winter storage, and charge it to jobs the same way wages are charged. Without that rate, equipment-heavy municipal work always looks more profitable than it is, right up until the loan payments say otherwise.
Sealing has its own wrinkle: sealant bought in totes ahead of the shoulder season is inventory until it hits a driveway, and treating a spring stock-up as an instant expense distorts exactly the months you quote hardest from.
Driveways and contract work run on different cash rules
Residential work is deposit-driven: a booking deposit, the balance by e-transfer or card while the roller is still warm. Commercial and municipal work runs under the Construction Act: a proper invoice, payment due in 28 days under prompt-payment rules, and 10% held back until the lien window closes. One company, two entirely different receivables.
We keep them apart in the ledger. Deposits sit as a liability until the job is complete, so a strong booking spring never masquerades as earned profit. Holdbacks post to their own receivable account, outside the regular aging, so the AR report shows what is genuinely collectible this month rather than a total inflated by money that is legally parked. As release dates approach, that holdback ledger doubles as a collections calendar. When those amounts become income and when HST becomes due are filing questions, and our Corporate Tax Filing work handles the timing.
Payroll that ramps in May and winds down in November
A paving payroll can triple between the first spring shift and mid-July, run long days with overtime through the peak, then issue a stack of ROEs when the plants stop shipping. Inside End-to-End Accounting we run the whole arc: seasonal onboarding, overtime and vacation pay calculated properly, source deductions remitted on the correct schedule, WSIB premiums reported on actual wages instead of a stale estimate, and ROEs issued promptly so the crew can start EI claims without friction.
Flag persons and traffic-control hours belong on the job cost, not just the payroll register. Coding them to the contracts that required them keeps municipal work priced honestly against driveway work, where none of that overhead exists.
A close that works as hard as the season
From May to November we close monthly and fast: plant statements reconciled against tickets, fuel cards matched, holdback movements updated, HST coded at 13% on both sides, and a one-page margin view by segment in your hands while you can still act on it. GTA plants issue monthly statements that rarely match the tickets first try; reconciling them is where overbilling gets caught.
Winter closes are lighter on purpose. The off-season is when the year-end file, the CCA decisions on the iron and the planning conversation happen, and clean in-season books are what make all three quick. When a monthly number raises a bigger question, whether the second crew paid for itself, whether sealing deserves its own crew, that becomes a decision conversation, and our decision guides show how we run those.
