Bookkeeping for Marine Service & Repair
Boats break in creative, expensive, deeply inconvenient ways, which is great for business and terrible for your books — because every job is different and the profit hides in the details. If you can't cost a job, you can't tell a good one from a bilge fire.
Every job is different, so every job has to be costed
Marine service is job-cost work whether you call it that or not. Labor, parts, sublet jobs (canvas, electronics, rigging), and shop supplies all belong to specific jobs, and if they're just piling into one big expense bucket, your real margin per job is anybody's guess. That's how a shop stays slammed all season and somehow ends the year flat.
Clean books tie costs to jobs, so you can see the margin on a repower versus a wash-and-wax, price the next one from data instead of a hunch, and catch the jobs that quietly lose money every single time you take them.
Warranty work and billable hours are where money leaks
Warranty work is real revenue that arrives on a manufacturer's very relaxed schedule — you do the labor now and get reimbursed whenever the paperwork clears. Track it as the receivable it is, or it silently distorts a couple of months and you never quite know where you stand.
Then there's the eternal service-shop question: where did the billable hours go? The gap between the hours your techs are paid for and the hours you actually bill is pure margin, leaking. We make it visible, which is the first step to plugging it.
How Kaizen runs it
We run your books on QuickBooks Online, job-cost labor and parts, track warranty receivables and parts inventory, and reconcile it all in a documented monthly close that lands the same way every period. Mobile and dockside work gets handled as cleanly as shop work.
It's named after kaizen, continuous improvement — so each month the costing gets a little sharper and the leaks a little smaller. Unglamorous, and exactly what a service business needs.
What's included
- Job costing on labor, parts, sublet work, and shop supplies
- Warranty work tracked as a receivable, with reimbursement timing
- Parts inventory tracked with real cost of goods
- Technician billable-hours visibility — what's paid vs. what's billed
- Mobile / dockside jobs handled as cleanly as shop jobs
- Sales and use tax handled across labor, parts, and sublet
- Bank and credit-card reconciliations every month
- 1099 tracking plus a monthly data-quality scan
Pricing
Straight answers
Do you actually job-cost, or just categorize expenses?
We job-cost — labor, parts, and sublet tied to specific jobs — so you get real margin per job. Bucket-everything bookkeeping on a service shop is how a good month and a bad month end up looking identical.
How do you handle warranty work?
As a receivable, with the reimbursement timing tracked — because you do the labor now and the manufacturer pays whenever the paperwork clears. Left untracked, it quietly distorts your monthly numbers.
We're behind and it's the middle of season.
Normal starting point. Month 1 of the Reset is the catch-up while you keep turning wrenches; we reconcile, set up job costing, and land a first real close without you touching a spreadsheet.
We're a two-person shop. Overkill?
Possibly. A tiny shop with simple jobs and a solid bookkeeper can be fine. The value shows up once you have multiple techs, warranty work, and enough job variety that margin is a mystery.
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.
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