You’re running service calls all morning, roughing in a new build in the afternoon, and dealing with a warranty callback from last month’s water heater install before you head home. Three completely different revenue streams, three different margin profiles, and most plumbing contractors track them all in one undifferentiated bucket.
That makes it nearly impossible to know which side of your business is actually making money.
What Plumbing Contractors Need From Their Books
Plumbing businesses are uniquely complex because most shops run both service and construction work simultaneously. The financial dynamics of dispatching a tech on a $300 service call are nothing like the dynamics of a $200K rough-in on a new apartment building. Your books need to reflect that.
Service vs. construction revenue separation. We split your financials so you can see service revenue, margins, and costs completely independent of your construction projects. If your service division is subsidizing your project work or vice versa, you’ll know.
Flat-rate vs. T&M profitability. If you’re running flat-rate pricing on service calls, do you actually know your margin per call type? We track revenue and labor by call type so you can see which flat-rate prices need adjusting and which are printing money.
Inventory and material tracking. Trucks stocked with fittings, valves, water heaters, and parts. Material costs that walk out the door without getting billed to a job. We set up systems to track inventory usage per job and per truck so you stop losing margin to unbilled materials.
Warranty reserve accounting. Callbacks cost money. Every water heater install, every repipe, every fixture package carries warranty risk. We help you set up reserves so warranty costs don’t blindside your quarterly numbers.
Job costing for construction projects. Your commercial and new construction work needs phase-level cost tracking: underground, rough-in, trim, fixtures, startup. We build the cost code structure to match how your estimator prices the work.
Progress billing and retainage. On larger construction projects, you’re billing against a schedule of values with retainage held back. We manage the billing, track retainage as a separate receivable, and reconcile everything against your contract.
The Problems We Solve for Plumbers
Plumbing contractors call us when their books can’t tell them whether service work or construction is driving their profit. When they’ve got retainage from three GCs floating as regular receivables and their cash flow picture is distorted. When their flat-rate pricing hasn’t been updated in two years and they have no data to know which way to adjust.
We also hear from plumbing shop owners who are growing fast and the bookkeeping that worked at $500K is breaking down at $2M. More trucks, more techs, more projects, more complexity. The back office needs to scale with the field.
Common Questions From Plumbing Contractors
How do you handle service call revenue vs. project revenue? We set up separate revenue classes and cost centers for your service division and your construction division. You get P&L statements for each, plus a consolidated company view.
Can you track profitability by truck or by tech? Yes. We can structure your job costing to show revenue and costs by individual technician, by truck, or by service zone, depending on how you want to analyze the business.
What about dispatch software integration? We work with ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, FieldEdge, and other dispatch platforms. We reconcile the data from your dispatch system to your accounting system so the numbers match.
See What Your Numbers Should Look Like
We’ll review your books and show you how a plumbing-specific financial setup works. Whether you’re running a service shop, a construction crew, or both, we’ll lay out what’s working and what’s not.