Bookkeeper for Air Duct Cleaning Companies

How does the money flow through an air duct cleaning business?

Almost all of your money comes in as one payment per job, usually at the end of the visit. That payment can be a credit card, a check, or cash handed over at the door, and it belongs to one job.

There is no recurring revenue in residential air duct cleaning. A customer's ducts get cleaned once, and they don't come back for years. So a month is a run of one-time tickets, not a pass of scheduled charges, and the books have to treat each job as its own event.

People buy add-ons in the same visit. Dryer vent cleaning is the common one, and new customers often come in through a $99 advertised job that was never meant to make money on its own. Both show up on the same ticket and the same payment. We separate the service lines in your books so you see what the add-on is worth, and we tie the payment to the job that produced it.

A portion of the money arrives as cash. Cash never shows up in a bank feed attached to a job name, it just shows as a deposit. So part of what we do is match every payment, card or cash, to the job that earned it. Each deposit in the bank then explains itself, and your revenue totals match what actually landed.

What costs should I watch month to month?

Labor is the biggest cost per job, and marketing is the biggest ongoing cost. The rest of the list is shorter than most owners expect.

A standard residential job takes one or two technicians, usually one to four hours. The labor rate runs around $90 to $125 an hour. Do the math once and the shape of the business appears: a $450 job that takes two and a half hours at $125 an hour is more than $300 in labor at the van, leaving under $150 for supplies, fuel, insurance, and your own pay. That is why job level labor data matters so much in this trade.

Marketing is second because it is tied line. The $99 job is advertising on a van. Nobody returns for years, so the flow of new work is not automatic. It is bought. When the advertised wide dollar trips are extra to it in a line on the P& L removes the true cost of getting a customer. We keep marketing as its own expense line so you can see your fixed cost per lead.

Then come the ones that don't move with the job: insurance, licensing, a little stock of filters and supplies. And one which does move, the fuel and van wear, which climb when you pack more jobs into a day. The rig itself, the power vacuum and the truck, is a separate capital cost that you spread over years, which is the last point on this guide and.

What bookkeeping mistakes do air duct companies make?

Most mistakes boil down to the books turning a job business into a single total. The standard set-up records all revenue as one line and all labor as another, and the owner ends up without the two numbers that matter: a specific job's cost and its margin.

• Duct job treated the same as the add-on. Then neither has a cost or margin, and the owner doesn't see that the add-on is the profitable part.
• Job hours, not tracked. The revenue minus labor total is not visible per job. If labor exceeds revenue, the owner sees a net loss but not where it came.
• Cash deposits not tied to a job. Cash gets recorded as a total deposit, total revenue looks fine but job detail is gone, preventing job level reporting.
• Marketing minus hidden in a general line. The cost of getting a customer is hidden, so the customer-acquisition cost is never tracked.

What should be tracked separately?

Four things get their own lines, because each one supports a different decision.

• Service lines. Duct cleaning, dryer vent, other add-ons. Each line has its own margin shows which service actually pays for the visit and which is buying it.
• The job itself. The labor hours, the labor rate, the job's revenue. This job is the unit of truth.
• Marketing you investment. All the ads, the cheap jobs and promo spots, so you know what a typical customer cost you.
• The van. Fuel, maintenance, insurance, so you see the fuel dollar per job which is embedded in pricing.

The rig and the truck are not a month's expense. They are multi-year assets. When a cleaner pays $30,000 for a rig and calls it a cost in one month, the month looks dreadful and the year looks too good. We set the equipment as an asset and spread the spend over its life. The van needs the same treatment.

Which reports should I watch read, and what do I watch?

The monthly P&L is the baseline, but it is not the report that runs the trade. The job-level report is. Check it weekly.

The monthly P&L from structured clean set of books if you are catching the job level line on a weekly basis. A job report should be the page you open most often to see if a special double-job is worth it.

What decisions should the books help me make?

With job data on the books, decisions get concrete instead of guesswork.

• Pricing. $450 to $650 is the common range for a single-system home, but job cost tells you if that will work. If most jobs take four hours at $120 an hour, the bottom of the range is under your cost and you need to sell higher.
• Hiring and a second van. When the calendar fills and employees never have too many hours, the data shows whether an extra tech adds revenue or just divides the same work.
• The ad budget. The cost a lead number, you AD money: whether a $99 ad is a funnel for the right work, and whether the money is better spent on referrals or reach.
• A machine purchase. Before you buy new equipment, the cash flow and job costs show if the vehicle will return its value within a time frame that works for your business.

In that order, the books stop being schedule and become the way air duct cleaner actually runs the shop.

If you want a set of books put together for this job's shape, the right entry is the Monthly Bookkeeping service page. It starts at $300 a month, and it covers the setup and the steady number work of keeping the job lines clean.