#trades
Track trades, investments, and portfolio transactions
Installs pay once; battery plans and service calls pay every year. Split install, recurring, and warranty-reserve lines or winter eats the margin.
North Carolina requires a GC license once a project's final price, change orders included, hits $40,000 — cross it unlicensed and the contract is void.
A radon contractor's pCi/L guarantee is a warranty liability — accrue it per install, split testing from mitigation revenue, and amortize licenses monthly.
Garage door shops hold 10–15% net margins by accruing a warranty reserve, loading labor with 35% burden, and logging truck stock and state licenses per job.
Cost UL 325 safety devices as their own COGS line, target 50% gross and 15–20% net, and book gate maintenance contracts as deferred revenue.
Louisiana's HB 953 dissolves the State Plumbing Board on January 1 — journeyman hours drop from 7,000 to 2,500 and the apprentice ratio rises to 1:3.
Backflow testers bill $70-$300 per assembly on a mandated annual retest cycle - track calibration, registrations and prepaid plans as their own ledger lines.
Price custom woodwork from true costs — 15–25% material markup, overhead per billable hour, 10–20% profit — not a materials-times-three guess.
A mobile welder quoting $90 an hour often spends $20–$35 of every arc hour on shielding gas, wire, and abrasives alone. This guide shows how to book consumables as direct job costs, build a true cost per arc hour, price the non-arc hours around it, and keep the rig, mileage, and Section 179 records that hold up at tax time.
A security camera installer runs three businesses out of one bank account — installs, monitoring contracts, and truck stock. This guide covers job-costing installs as separate equipment and labor buckets, booking monitoring fees as deferred revenue, cycle-counting truck inventory, budgeting licensing and certifications, and the eight monthly KPIs that decide what the company is worth.
A watch or clock repair shop's books must treat customer timepieces as bailments (never inventory), consigned parts as off-balance-sheet goods, and deposits as liabilities until pickup. This guide covers how AWCI CW21 certification should show up in the rate card, work-in-process for movements sent to specialists, warranty reserves for comebacks, Section 179 on bench equipment, sales tax on parts vs. labor, and the KPIs — revenue per bench hour, comeback rate, parts-to-labor ratio — that predict breakeven.
A bookkeeping guide for window screen and screen door repair businesses. Separate revenue lines for rescreens, frame rebuilds, doors and landlord contracts; track mesh by grade (fiberglass, aluminum, solar, pet-resistant) as cost of goods sold; log mileage per stop at the 2026 IRS rate of 72.5 to 76 cents; and bank spring surplus to cover three to four months of fixed costs through winter.
