Three businesses, one logo
The build crew pours and installs from May to August. The service arm opens pools in spring, runs weekly routes all summer and closes everything by Thanksgiving. The store sells chlorine, parts and hot tubs year-round. Each line earns differently, spends differently and fails differently, so the first thing we build is a chart of accounts that refuses to blend them.
Blended books hide real problems. A build that lost money to overruns disappears inside a strong chemical season; a route priced below its drive time hides behind two profitable installs. With revenue and direct costs coded by line, the monthly statements say which of the three businesses carried the other two, and that one answer changes pricing, hiring and what you say yes to next spring.
Builds: deposits, stages and a job ledger
A new-build deposit is not revenue. It is a liability owed back in work, and it stays on the balance sheet until the job earns it, while stage invoices are recognized as the stages they bill for complete. Every build carries its own job ledger: the excavation and concrete subs, steel and liner or shell, plumbing runs, the electrical contractor who bonds the equipment pad, and the pump, filter and heater package. When the final invoice goes out, the job report shows the true margin, overruns included, while the memory is still fresh enough to fix the next quote.
Those subcontractors also trigger T5018 reporting with its own calendar, which lives on our pool company tax services page. The books' job is simpler: every sub payment lands on the job it dug.
Route software already knows; the books should listen
Skimmer, Pool Brain or Jobber already records every stop, dose and opening. We map their invoice items to income accounts so weekly service, openings, closings and repair calls each report separately in QuickBooks Online, and the route revenue you see reconciles to the visits that happened. Opening and closing packages sold in March, before a single truck rolls, are held as a customer liability until the work occurs, so April does not look like a windfall and May like a famine.
Receipts follow the same discipline. Dext captures fuel, parts and distributor invoices from a phone photo, coded to route, build or store. That is the operating layer of End-to-End Accounting: bookkeeping, payroll, financial reporting and tax filing in one engagement, closed every month.
The counter: chemicals are inventory, not an expense
The spring chemical order is one of the largest cheques of the year, and none of it is a cost until it sells. It sits as inventory, relieved through cost of goods sold as the buckets leave, which is the only way the store's margin means anything. A point of sale such as Lightspeed rings the 13% at the till and feeds daily sales to the books, and a periodic count keeps shrinkage and mis-scans from quietly rewriting the margin.
| Counter line | What the monthly close checks |
|---|---|
| Chlorine, salt and balancers | Cost of goods sold against a real count, not last year's percentage |
| Parts, filters and accessories | Margin after freight, which quietly eats small-parts profit |
| Hot tubs on the floor | Each unit costed with freight, prep and delivery, matched to its sale |
| The water-test counter | Earns nothing directly, so its labour is coded to retail, where it belongs |
Priced honestly, the free water test is the store's best salesperson. Buried in blended payroll, it is a mystery leak nobody can size.
Payroll that hires in April and shrinks in October
Service techs and install crews arrive in a burst, bringing WSIB premiums, statutory holiday pay for people hired six weeks earlier, and ROEs when the routes wind down. Because payroll runs inside the same engagement as the books, labour lands on the line that used it, and the winter question of who to keep on payroll gets argued from real numbers on our pool company CFO page.
A one-truck route operator with a hundred stops does not need all of this; they need fast answers when a CRA letter or an odd contract shows up, which is what CPA Quick Support covers at $99 a month. Companies running crews across Mississauga and the GTA get the full monthly close, quoted in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call, and year-end flows straight into a clean corporate tax filing with no rebuild.
