Mechanical, Electrical & Plumbing (MEP)

You learned a skilled trade. Then you started a business. Nobody told you the paperwork would be the hardest part.

You Learned a Trade, Not Accounting

You became a plumber, electrician, or HVAC tech because you’re good at solving problems with your hands. You spent years learning codes, getting licensed, working under people who knew the trade inside and out. Eventually you went out on your own.

Now you’re running crews, bidding jobs, dealing with suppliers, chasing payments, and still finding time to do service calls yourself. The bookkeeping happens at 10pm on your kitchen table. Or it doesn’t happen at all and tax season becomes a disaster.

We handle the numbers so you can stay focused on the work. That’s what we do.

Service Work and Project Work

Most MEP contractors run two businesses without realizing it. There’s the service side where a tech shows up, diagnoses the problem, fixes it, and collects payment that day. And there’s the project side where you bid a job, do rough-in and trim-out over weeks or months, and wait 30 to 60 days to get paid.

These are completely different operations with different margins and different cash flow patterns. Service calls might run 45% gross margin on a $400 ticket. A commercial HVAC install might run 18% on a $150,000 contract. Mixing them together in your books hides whether either side of the business is actually making money.

Who We Work With

Plumbing contractors, HVAC contractors, electrical contractors, and fire protection contractors across the Wasatch Front. Shops doing residential service, new construction, tenant improvements, commercial work, or some combination of all of it.

What Makes It Complicated

Service work mixed with project work. Materials sitting on trucks that need tracking to specific jobs. Labor split across multiple sites in a single day. Progress billing and retainage on commercial projects. Warranty callbacks that come out of your original profit.

Where Profits Disappear

Materials are the silent killer. Your tech pulls fittings and wire from the van for a service call. Nobody writes it down. The job shows labor but half the materials never get charged. You think you’re making 45% on service calls but the real number is closer to 28% once you account for everything that came off the truck.

Warranty work is the other killer. When you go back to fix a callback, that labor and material comes straight out of your original profit. If warranty costs get buried in general overhead instead of tracked to the original job, you have no idea which jobs actually made money. That estimate you thought was solid? Maybe it lost money after the second trip back.

Materials Not Tracked to Jobs

Parts pulled from trucks, materials ordered direct to job sites, inventory that walks off or gets used on the wrong project. If materials aren’t allocated to specific jobs, your job costs are wrong and your pricing decisions are based on fiction.

Warranty Work Hidden in Overhead

Callbacks treated as general labor expense instead of charged back to the original job. You can’t see which crews cause more warranty issues or which types of installations have recurring problems that need to be addressed in your process.

Change Orders Not Captured

Scope creep that never gets billed. The customer asks for one more outlet, a different fixture location, an additional zone. Without capturing these changes as they happen, you end up doing free work and wondering why the job came in under margin.

Labor Jumbled Together

Techs work on multiple jobs in a single day. Without proper time tracking, labor hours get estimated or allocated to the wrong jobs. Big projects end up subsidizing small ones and you can’t tell which work is actually profitable.

Know Your Numbers by Job

Every job gets costed properly. Materials, labor, subcontractors, equipment, permits. You can look at a completed project and know exactly what you made. Or you can look at it and realize you lost money. Either way, you have the information you need to make better decisions on the next bid.

Service work and project work get separated so you can see which side of your business carries the other. Warranty costs get tracked to original jobs so patterns become visible. Monthly financials get closed on time so you’re making decisions with current numbers instead of guessing based on your bank balance.

Job-Level Visibility

Every job shows true profit after all costs are accounted for. Service calls tracked separately from project work. You know which work types, which crews, and which customer segments actually make money for your business.

Clean Books for Tax Time

Monthly bookkeeping means year-end is not a scramble. Your accountant gets organized financials with job costing already done. Vehicle depreciation, tool purchases, and job-specific expenses get captured instead of missed or estimated.

Utah's Construction Bookkeeping Specialists