Bookkeeper for Irrigation Companies

How does money flow through an irrigation business?

Two kinds of money come in, and they land in different months. The first is one-time install work, priced per system or per zone. The second is recurring service work: spring start-ups, winterization, repairs, and the maintenance contract you run through the year. One published program sells routine maintenance for one to six zones at $210 a season, with a $105 spring start-up and a $105 winterization as separate line items. One owner in Florida charges $800 a zone for installs.

Those two need separate homes in the books, because they mean different things. Install revenue is money you earned once and will have to go sell again next year. Service revenue is money that comes back on its own, and it is the number a buyer asks about in the first twenty minutes of a sale conversation. If the books show only one total revenue line, you cannot see how much of your business actually repeats.

Why does seasonality matter in the books?

The jobs and the cash do not land in the same months. Winterization bills in the fall, spring start-ups bill in the spring, and installs swallow the summer, but payroll runs in every month. That creates a real gap between when the work happens and when you have money in the bank to pay for it.

The books need to make that gap visible, not hide it. That means recording the seasonal revenue in the season that earns it, and watching cash flow separately from profit. If the books only ever show a year-end total, you cannot see in November whether you have enough in the pipeline to carry payroll through February, or whether you will borrow to get there.

What does a job actually cost?

A job is the unit that matters in this trade, and it needs to carry its own complete cost. One work order might cover a six-zone install, with the parts, the hours, the trench digging, the rewire, and the markup all flowing through the same quote. The books have to let that job show its full cost: materials, labor for every visit, equipment use, and its share of the overhead.

That is exactly where the pricing formula lives. The trade prices a job as materials plus labor plus overhead plus a markup, and the markup stays in a range of 20 to 50 percent with overhead between 5 and 15 percent. That formula only works if the bookkeeping actually traces what comes out. If the job does not carry the cost of a second call when a joint leaks and you go back or the time you spent quoting, the markup number is a guess.

What should be tracked separately in the books?

The single most useful thing a chart of accounts can do for an irrigation company is separate the work that repeats from the work that closes, and then separate parts from labor within each. Install revenue, service revenue, and maintenance contract revenue belong on three lines, with the costs that belong to each one next to it.

• Install revenue and the materials that go into it
• Service and repair revenue, with the parts and labor that go into it
• Maintenance contracts, which hold the recurring relationship
• Vehicle costs, fuel, and tool expenses, which are overhead that needs to be a known line

When those sit in one mystery bucket, you can see whether the company made money, but not which side of the business carried it. That is the difference between deciding to buy another truck you still need and growing a service line that actually pays for it.

What overhead gets missed when you price a job?

The overhead is the number that eats the profit when it is guessed instead of measured. It is the truck that carries the crew, the insurance that protects the install, the fuel that does not always get billed to a job, the tool that breaks mid-season, the time you spend retraining a technician. Rain Bird, the parts manufacturer, tells new contractors outright that the real overhead sits in fuel, insurance, tool wear, administrative time, marketing, and training, and that beginners forget all six.

The biggest thing is understanding what your overhead is and making sure you put profit on your overhead, as well as your labor and materials. That is from a contractor quoted in the trade magazine Lawn & Landscape, and it is the sentence that keeps a lot of careful numbers people honest.

So the books need an overhead line that does not live in vague percentages. When the overhead shows as a flat monthly number across the year, you can see exactly what the markup is actually carrying, and what you would need in cash just to cover the quiet months.

What actually goes wrong in the books for this trade?

The first failure is the one that everyone in the industry warns about: the field software and the books become two separate worlds. The route runs in one scheduling system, and the books have to be reconciled by hand because the other system and the company do not talk. A schedule shows the work happened, and the chart of accounts never sees a deposit that matches. That is the well documented pain.

The second failure is miscategorization of the wrong kind of job. An install and a service need to be labeled, but this is a labor bucket where a repair technician and an install crew both drop, and you will not know which side of the business is actually healthy.

The third failure is timing. A heavy summer in the field and the bookkeeping did not happen in the field. The owner catches it around tax time, when the books are a year old and every decision that was time-sensitive has already been made. The way around it is the same-day attention a clean feed just gives.

Which numbers matter, and what decisions do they drive?

Three reports do most of the work there. They are the difference between a set of books you open out of obedience and a set of books you open to plan the month.

One more number sits behind a sale of the business. A buyer will ask what share of revenue is recurring service work within the first twenty minutes of a call. If the books answer that from a clean, separate service line, that business conversation starts one brant at full strength. If they do not, the same conversation gets awkward and distant.