Updated April 2026 · Reviewed by Cory Salisbury, Construction Financial Specialist
Fractional CFO services designed for the unique financial challenges of trades earning $500K–$10M.
Specialty trade contractors — electricians, plumbers, HVAC techs, painters, concrete crews, framers, roofers — face unique financial hurdles that off-the-shelf accounting software doesn't solve:
Salisbury Bookkeeping provides fractional CFO services built for specialty trades, with job costing by trade, crew labor tracking, material cost management, and financial systems that keep pace with your volume.
Every trade has its own flavor. Here's what keeps owners up at night.
Trades often run a 40–60% labor cost. Without crew-level tracking, you can't spot which crews (or which jobs) are profitable. We track labor by crew, by job, by trade type.
Scrap, leftover lumber, unused electrical wire — waste happens. Most systems treat material cost as a fixed line item. We separate actual material cost from waste, so you see the real picture.
A $200 emergency plumbing call has a different margin than a $8K bathroom retrofit. Mixed revenue models confuse margins. We separate and track both revenue streams separately.
Warranty costs are a silent drain on profits. You need reserves for future warranty work, but they're rarely accounted for properly. We build warranty reserves into your P&L from day one.
You might have 40–100 active jobs in a month. Manual job costing is impossible. We automate job-level costing so you see profitability by job, not just by month.
Summer rushes, winter slowdowns, unpredictable customer payment cycles. Without seasonal forecasting, cash flow surprises hurt. We build rolling forecasts so you know when cash crunches are coming.
We specialize in all types of specialty trades. Here are a few we work with closely:
Residential rewires, service upgrades, commercial panel installations. Tracking unbilled hours and material margin is critical.
Service calls, drain cleaning, new construction rough-ins, remodels. Multiple revenue streams, tight margins on service work.
Equipment installation, maintenance contracts, emergency service. Parts, labor, and seasonal demand swings all affect margin.
Interior/exterior, commercial, residential. Labor-heavy, weather-dependent, multiple crews in field simultaneously.
Site prep, foundation work, flatwork, decorative. Material cost swings, equipment rental, crew productivity tracking.
Residential framing, commercial structural, deck work. High-volume short-term jobs, fast crew turnover, seasonal hiring.
Residential repairs, reroof, commercial flat roofing. Weather-dependent, warranty heavy, material cost fluctuations.
Installation, tile, hardwood, specialty surfaces. Material-heavy, high waste potential, subcontractor relationships.
Design-build, maintenance, soil/plant material costs, equipment depreciation, seasonal crew scaling.
Our approach combines fractional CFO expertise with systems built for trades.
We integrate payroll with job costing so you see real labor cost per job, per crew, per trade. No guessing. You know which crews are profitable and which aren't.
Every material receipt is tied to a job. Waste is tracked separately from material cost of goods sold. You see the true material margin per job, not a blended average.
Your emergency call revenue has different margins than your 3-week project work. We split these into separate P&L lines so you see which revenue stream is actually profitable.
Every job gets a warranty reserve allocation (typically 2–5% of revenue). This creates a liability on your books, so when a warranty claim hits, it's not a surprise loss.
50 jobs in a month? We automate the tracking so each job has real labor, material, and overhead cost. You're not relying on memory or guesswork.
Monthly or quarterly, we review your P&L, job profitability, cash flow, and margins with you. We spot trends—and problems—before they become emergencies.
We integrate these tools to create a financial system built for trades:
Core accounting platform. We customize your chart of accounts, class structures, and job costing setup so QBO becomes your financial nerve center—not just a tax filing tool.
Job costing and project management integration. Knowify is built for trades with real-time crew time tracking, material logging, and automatic cost pulls into QBO. If you're small, QBO's native job costing works.
Payroll (ADP, Guidepoint), time tracking (Knowify, Fieldwire), crew communication (Slack, Teams). Everything feeds cost data back into your P&L so labor, material, and overhead are real-time, not entered manually.
We handle the setup and integration. You handle your crews.
Questions specific to specialty trade contractors:
We use a "spot check and monthly reconcile" approach. Crews log materials used in the field via Knowify or similar; we reconcile inventory monthly. Waste is calculated as the delta between material purchased and material charged to jobs. This doesn't slow crews—it's built into your accounting system, not a separate tracking process.
Warranty reserves are a P&L and balance sheet item; they don't affect crew pay or job invoicing. When you bill a job at $10K, we allocate 3% ($300) to a warranty reserve account. If a warranty claim hits, we deduct it from the reserve. Crews don't see this—it's financial accounting, not operational.
This is common (especially electricians and plumbers). We use time-tracking integration so each crew member logs time to the job they're working on that day. At the end of the week, hours roll up to job costs. Some days crews split between jobs; the system handles it proportionally.
We split your revenue and cost into two buckets: "Service" and "Projects" (or "Recurring" and "One-Time" if that fits better). Each gets its own P&L lines. This instantly shows you which model is more profitable. Most trades find service calls have lower margin but better cash flow; projects have higher margin but longer cash cycles.
At minimum, monthly. For trades with high-volume shorter jobs, we recommend a "rolling 2-week" KPI review: profitability on jobs closed that fortnight, outstanding costs on open jobs, crew labor variance. This catches cost overruns before they're catastrophic.
P&L tells you if you made money overall (revenue minus costs). Job costing tells you which jobs made money. If your P&L shows 10% net profit but half your jobs are losing money, you're flying blind. We do both. P&L is your rear-view mirror; job costing is your windshield.
We'll review your current financial setup, show you the blind spots (most trades have a few), and outline a plan to get real job costing, labor tracking, and cash flow visibility in place.
Phone: (385) 374-9295
Email: cory@salisburybookkeeping.com