Bookkeeping for Electrical Contractors
Copper doesn't hold still, change orders show up verbally, and the estimate you bid in January is a work of historical fiction by summer. Your books should at least keep up with reality. We keep them costed by job, reconciled monthly, and closed on a date you can circle.
The margin lives in the job, not the P&L
Service work, tenant improvements, and larger projects earn money on completely different clocks. A well-run P&L doesn't just tell you the company made money — it tells you which jobs made it and which quietly gave it back. That only happens if costs land against the job while the work is still fresh, not reconstructed from memory at year-end.
Change orders are where profit leaks. The extra runs and the panel upgrade the customer asked for on-site are real costs; if they never make it onto the invoice, you financed the upgrade for free. Clean books make the uninvoiced work visible before it becomes a donation.
What clean electrical books actually tell you
With costs tied to jobs, you can see real gross margin by work type, how much material price swings ate this quarter, and whether your labor burden — apprentice to journeyman mix, overtime, truck time — is priced into your rates or just absorbed.
On larger jobs, tracking work-in-progress keeps the books honest month to month, so a project that's 40% billed but 70% built doesn't make a lean month look like a great one.
How Kaizen runs it
We run QuickBooks Online, Ramp for cards, and Gusto for payroll, set up so transactions capture themselves at the source. Then we run a documented month-end close on the same date every month — same reports, same owner per step, no heroics required when someone's on vacation.
We're named after kaizen, continuous improvement, which mostly means catching the miscoded supply-house invoice in the reconciliation instead of next spring. Not glamorous. Reliable.
What's included
- Transaction categorization tuned to supply houses, fuel, and permit fees
- Bank & credit-card reconciliations — every account, every month
- Job costing by service, tenant-improvement, and project work
- Change-order tracking so uninvoiced extras stop leaking margin
- Work-in-progress tracking on larger jobs so billing and cost stay honest
- Material-cost visibility so copper and gear swings don't hide in one line
- 1099 tracking for subs and filing at year-end
- Monthly data-quality scan — uncategorized, unreconciled, imbalanced items flagged early
Pricing
Straight answers
We're behind and mid-project. Can you catch up without stopping the work?
Yes. We rebuild the backlog in parallel — categorization, reconciliations, and job costing — while current work keeps flowing. Most catch-ups land inside 30–45 days.
Can you track change orders and WIP properly?
That's the core of it. We tie costs and billings to each job so uninvoiced change orders surface and work-in-progress doesn't distort your monthly numbers.
Do I have to change software?
We work in QuickBooks Online. Coming from spreadsheets or desktop, migration is part of setup. Already on QBO, we clean the existing file.
Is this overkill for a small shop?
If you run mostly small service calls and your books are clean, a good bookkeeper is plenty — we'll tell you so. Once you're running projects with change orders and WIP, blended books start costing you real money.
Related
Free 20-minute books assessment
We'll show you the five things we'd fix first in your books — useful whether you hire us, hire someone, or do neither.
Talk to SalesOr call us directly: +1 786 789 0969