Start where the jobs already live
Every call your company runs is already documented once, in Jobber, ServiceTitan or Housecall Pro: the customer, the tech, the hours, the parts, the invoice, usually the payment. Plumbing books go wrong when that record and the accounting file drift apart, because nobody re-enters five hundred invoices correctly by hand. The fix is not more typing; it is a sync configured deliberately and then reconciled every month by someone who knows what to look for.
We see the same four breaks in almost every file we take over:
- One income account for everything. Every item in the app posts to a single Sales line, so service work, installs, parts and memberships can never be separated again.
- HST codes mapped wrong. An item set up as tax-exempt in the app quietly drops 13% HST from invoices until a filing period refuses to reconcile.
- Payments counted twice. The app pushes the payment, the bank feed records the deposit, and revenue doubles until someone catches it.
- Voids and refunds that never sync. The app shows the credit; the books still show the sale.
Set up properly, the item catalogue maps to income accounts you can actually manage from, and the bank reconciliation proves the whole chain, dispatch board to deposit, including the processor fees clipped off card payments collected at the door.
The parts on your trucks are inventory
A service truck can carry thousands of dollars in fittings, valves, supply lines, wax rings and repair kits. Expensing all of it the day it leaves Wolseley or Emco feels simple, but it bends the numbers two ways: restock months look unprofitable while the jobs that consumed those parts look better than they were, and year-end profit moves with the size of your last supplier order instead of the work you performed.
The workable middle for most shops is to treat truck and shop stock as inventory, count it on a schedule, a quick per-truck count quarterly and a full count at year-end, and let the counts drive cost of goods sold. The same counts expose shrink: parts installed but never put on an invoice, which on flat-rate work is margin leaking silently out the back of the truck.
What the app knows vs what the books must show
| Dispatch record | What the books need from it |
|---|---|
| Invoice with parts and labour lines | Revenue split by line of business, 13% HST accrued to the right filing period |
| Payment collected on site | Matched to the bank deposit once, with processor fees booked as an expense |
| Parts used on the job | Relieved from inventory into cost of goods sold, not expensed a second time |
| Deposit on a fixture order or reno | Held as a liability until the work is done, with HST timing handled correctly |
| Tech hours on the job | Payroll cost tied back to jobs so gross margin per job is genuine |
Service and construction are two different businesses
Emergency and service work bills same-day and collects at the door. New-construction and reno work bills by progress draw, waits on a builder's payment cycle and carries a 10% holdback under Ontario's Construction Act. Run both through one undivided profit line and you cannot see whether one side is quietly funding the other.
So we structure the chart of accounts by division: revenue, parts, labour and gross margin reported separately for service and contract work. The split keeps the tax side tidy too, because T5018 slips and holdback timing attach to the contract division, where they are easy to isolate when filings come due.
A monthly close, one engagement
Our End-to-End Accounting service runs all of this as one monthly cycle: receipts and supplier statements flow in through Dext, the dispatch sync is reviewed and posted in QuickBooks Online, payroll for techs and apprentices is remitted on time, HST returns are filed from books that already reconcile, and the corporate tax filing falls out of a file that was right all year. You see a divisional profit statement every month instead of a surprise every spring.
A one-truck operator who is not ready for monthly service still deserves answers between filings. CPA Quick Support at $99/month covers unlimited questions and CRA letter review from our Mississauga office, and the books can graduate to the full engagement when the second truck arrives.
