Branch and Ledger works with plumbing, HVAC, electrical, landscaping, and other field service businesses where job costing, fleet expenses, materials, and crew payroll shape the P&L. Books that give you margin visibility by job, not just monthly totals.
Field service businesses have a specific problem: the P&L on the last day of the month shows totals, not jobs. Everything is aggregated. Margins hide inside the totals. Bidding accuracy is guesswork, because there is no way to look back at last year's similar jobs and see what actual margin was.
Materials, labor, and fleet expenses flow into general categories. When it is time to bid the next job, pricing is off feel, not off what the last similar job actually cost.
Trucks, fuel, maintenance, insurance — all in one line. Which truck costs the most to run? Which is due for replacement? The books do not answer.
Materials for one job get charged and forgotten. Reimbursements for crew site pickups do not tie back to the job. Margin gets eroded a hundred dollars at a time.
Payroll runs weekly or bi-weekly. Which crew hours went to which job does not get tracked in the accounting file, so labor cost per job is unknown.
Change orders happen on site. Sometimes get promised verbally. Sometimes get written down. Sometimes get billed. Sometimes do not. Revenue leaks, and nobody catches it until it is too late.
Customer deposits, progress billing on multi-week jobs, and final invoicing all move through the books, but nobody is tracking earned versus collected. The P&L overstates or understates revenue depending on the month.
Field service bookkeeping done right is not more categories. It is a chart of accounts and a process that tie every dollar back to a job. That is the difference between a P&L you glance at and a P&L you use to run the business.
A cleanup rebuilds the chart of accounts and job structure so you have visibility. Ongoing bookkeeping keeps that visibility current, month after month, so bidding stops being guesswork.
Monthly P&L that does not tell you which jobs made money. Fleet costs in a bucket. Payroll not tied to jobs. Bidding off intuition.
Scoped, fixed-fee cleanup. Chart of accounts restructured for job costing. Historical jobs reconstructed where the data supports it. Payroll allocation set up. Fleet tracking established. Written summary of every material change.
Job profitability visible. Fleet costs allocated. Labor costs per job accurate. You can bid the next job with actual data behind you rather than gut feel.
Monthly bookkeeping. Jobs closed and reconciled. Fleet costs tracked. Payroll allocated. Change orders captured. Visibility never slips.
Cleanup pricing depends on how deep the structural gaps actually are. Before we quote cleanup, we run a paid diagnostic — a scoped, fixed-fee review of the current state of the books, the job costing setup (or lack of it), and the gap to where it needs to be. The diagnostic produces a written finding: what is broken, what a rebuild would cost, and whether we are the right shop for the work.
Bring your questions. We will tell you honestly what your books look like, what a diagnostic would take, and whether we are the right fit. If we are not, we will point you toward someone who is.
Book a discovery call