Bookkeeper for Dog Trainers

How are the three ways you get paid?

Most dog trainers get paid in three shapes: single private lessons, prepaid packages of four to six classes, and board-and-train programs that run for a week or longer.

Private sessions are usually billed by the hour, though many trainers bundle them. Group classes can cost anywhere from $30 to $80 a session, while a half-hour private lesson runs from $70 to $150. Board-and-train programs start around $3,500. Those are broad ranges from the industry, and your local numbers will sit on somewhere within them.

The big bookkeeping question is timing. When someone pays for a 6 week course on day one, you haven't earned it all on day one. The cash lands in your bank account, but it also shows up as a prepayment, and the real work happens over the next month and a half.

What do I do with the prepaid packages?

Treat prepaid money as a liability until you've done the work, not as income the moment it lands.

Suppose a client pays $600 for 6 classes in advance. Your bank account shows $600 coming in, and it's tempting to record that as revenue right now. But those classes are still ahead of you, and you could be refunded if the client drops out or your illness cancels the class. So we put that $600 in a liability account called deferred revenue. As you check off each class, we move the amount for that class over to training revenue.

This isn't a judgment about whether your business is growing. It's the standard for work you haven't performed yet. It means your monthly profit is a number you can actually spend, and you don't get kept a surprise in a slow month when refunds come in.

I sold a trained dog that cost $20,000. How do I record that?

A trained dog sale has two parts: the price of the dog itself and the training fee that has gone into it.

If you sell a protection dog for $20,000, a chunk of that covers the cost you incur to raise, evaluate, and feed the dog, what is sometimes called the cost of goods sold. The rest is the training fee you earn. You need to document those two pieces separately for tax, and for knowing whether selling dogs is profitable on its own, independent of your classes.

Set up a specific reason for the dog. Track what you spent on that animal feed, veterinary care, board, and the instructor time to train it. When the sale closes, record the income, subtract the cost of the dog, and you have the real profit from that transaction.

Without this split, your books treat the whole $20,000 as profit, and you pay taxes on money you never actually earned. We can help set up the accounts so the June suburban split happens automatically.

Is my dog a business deduction?

There is no blanket deduction for a dog that lives with you and also helps in your business. A dog is deductible only if it meets the IRS's ordinary and necessary test for a trade, and it must not be a personal pet.

The clearest cases are guard dogs that work on business premises, like a junkyard. Those have been upheld in court. A dog that is part of the brand because it appears in photos, even if it is the star of your marketing, has not survived as a full deduction so far. That's a major tax issue, and the answer is usually much narrower than advertisements promise.

What we can do as your bookkeeper is keep the dog's expenses separate and documented. If you have a strong argument that your dog works for the business, we make sure every cost related to that dog has a receipt and a written note saying what the expense was for. We never tell you what is deductible, that's for your CPA, but we keep the numbers clean so your CPA can defend the deduction if they choose to.

Which costs add up fastest for a dog trainer?

Rent for your training space, your vehicle, equipment, and insurance are the big overhead. The ones that creep up silently are the small ones that repeat every month.

Look at what actually goes into every class: treats, cleaning supplies to keep training spaces safe, the gas to drive to a client's home, and the printing of your handouts. None of those is large alone. Add a low monthly supply bill for six to eight classes and it becomes a real expense that you can easily lose in idle.

On the line cost side, trainers who have staff should track labor at a flat percentage of revenue. For a daycare that is around 40 to 50 cents on the dollar. Dog training is often more----- owned production, but if you grow, the labor percent is the one that swings monthly profit the most.

The bookkeeping trick is to go through a year of bank statements and to create a line for every category that is over a hundred dollars a month. One trainer asked us why the P&L kept showing a loss even though he had a full schedule. The missing line was vehicle cost. He was paying for a van he rarely drove for the business because his classes were indoors, but the depreciation and insurance were eating his profit.

What numbers should I look at every month?

The three reports that matter for a dog trainer are a profit and loss that shows each service line, a deferred revenue balance, and the cost per successfully trained dog.

Your P&L should not be one big number for training revenue. It should break out private lessons, group classes, board and train, and any dog sales. That tells you which part of your business actually pays the bills. We often see a trainer who does a lot of low margin group classes early, and the board and train program is what is the big profit. You can't see that if all you have is one big number.

The deferred revenue report is the one that says this month you collected $14,000 in prepayments, and that only $9,000 of it is earned so far. That tells you how many future classes you already have in the bank, and it's the number you use for a tax estimate.

Finally, keep track of the cost to train a dog to completion, neither a package nor a single hour. We've seen trainers who mispriced their board-and-train because they forgot to figure in the cost of feeding the dog while it lived with them. If your books give you that number, you stop guessing at your pricing.