Trades · HVAC contractors
Bookkeeping for HVAC contractors.
HVAC work is seasonal, heavy on equipment, and more and more of it is sold on service agreements paid in advance. Each of those does something different to the books. Here is what, and what I do about it.
168
93%
16×
HVAC · trade profile
2026
Specialty contractor
$15,000
06A specialty licence
EPA Section 608
0307
$1.9751 / hour
Seasons
Seattle needs heat sixteen times more than it needs cooling.
Degree days measure how far the weather sits from comfortable. Around Seattle, heating demand runs from October to May and cooling barely registers before July. Your revenue follows the same shape, and so should your cash planning.
Demand that swings this hard makes some months look like a boom and others like a problem, when neither is true. October compared with July means nothing. October compared with last October does.
- Every monthly report shows the same month last year beside this one.
- A cash plan for the quiet months, built from your own history.
- Tune-up season measured, so you can see whether maintenance work is filling the gaps.
The year in degree days
4,101
254
16.5 to 1
Service agreements
Paid in March. Earned through February.
A maintenance agreement sold for a year is cash on day one and a promise for the next twelve months. Until the visits are made, part of that cash is owed back in service, and the books have to say so.
Why it matters at scale
One agreement is a rounding error. Four hundred of them, sold mostly in spring, is $144,000 that was never all yours at once. Record it all as income when it lands and spring looks spectacular, while autumn looks like a slump that is not really there.
- Agreement cash recorded as service still owed, then moved into income month by month.
- Open agreements counted every month, with what is still owed on them.
- Renewals tracked, because the renewal rate is what tells you whether the programme works.
Equipment jobs
Half the job is the box.
On a heat pump or furnace replacement, the equipment can be the largest single cost on the job. When it is, a small slip in what you paid for it moves the margin more than a long day of labour does.
Where the margin hides
A 5% slip on the equipment in this job is $410. That is a fifth of the profit, gone before the crew arrives.
- Equipment costed to the job by purchase order, not by the month the supplier was paid.
- Subcontracted electrical on the job it belongs to. The 06A specialty covers the equipment and its controls, not the circuit that feeds it.
- Manufacturer credits and warranty parts matched back to the job they came from.
Rebates
A rebate paid to you is a receivable.
When a utility or manufacturer rebate comes to you rather than to the customer, the customer pays less at the door and someone else pays the rest, later. Until it arrives, that money is owed to you, and it needs chasing like any other invoice.
Keeping both payers straight
- The invoice split by payer: what the customer owes and what the programme owes.
- Open rebates listed every month, with the date each claim went in.
- Rejected claims caught early, while the job is fresh enough to fix the paperwork.
L&I premiums
The one cost that moves with the season.
L&I charges workers’ comp for every hour worked, not as a share of wages. HVAC work, class 0307, is $1.9751 an hour in 2026. In a quiet month with fewer hours worked, the premium falls with them.
Built into the labour rate
At just under $2 an hour, the premium is small per hour and large per year. It belongs in the loaded labour rate you bid with and in the cost of every job, not in a lump at the end of the quarter.
- Hours by class from real timesheets, the only basis L&I accepts.
- Premiums coded to the jobs that generated the hours.
- What L&I billed reconciled each quarter, with payroll itself left to your payroll provider.
The work
What I actually do about all this.
I keep the books. I do not file your taxes and I am not your CPA. What I do is make sure the numbers behind every one of those filings are right, and hand your tax preparer statements they can work from without rebuilding anything.
- Service agreements recorded as they are earned, with what is still owed counted every month.
- Equipment, labour and subcontracted electrical costed to each job, by purchase order.
- Rebates owed to you tracked until the money arrives.
- Monthly reports that compare like with like, this October against last October.
- Every account reconciled to the penny against its real statement, every month.
Where to start
Behind on the books, or not sure they would survive a look? Start with cleanup. Running fine but want them kept right? Start with monthly.
Questions
Questions HVAC contractors ask.
Don’t see yours? Email me at paulaleksic@apcbookkeeping.com
If you want monthly numbers you can trust, yes. The cash arrives up front, but the work is spread across the year. Recording it as service still owed and moving it into income month by month keeps spring from looking better than it was and autumn from looking worse.
As money owed to you by the programme, recorded when the job is invoiced and cleared when the payment arrives. That way an unpaid rebate shows up on a list instead of disappearing into a lower job total.
Yes, as long as each purchase is tied to a job. A purchase order or job number on the supplier invoice is enough for me to put the cost on the right job.
No. Payroll and the quarterly L&I report stay with a payroll provider, and I can introduce you to one I trust. My side is making sure the wages, taxes and premiums it produces land on the right jobs and in the right accounts, and that what L&I billed ties out to the hours in your books.
With cleanup: rebuild the ledger from your statements, reconcile every account, and find out where things really stand before anything else is filed. Multi-year cleanups are routine work here, and once they are done the monthly routine keeps the books from slipping again.
Book a free consult
Tell me where the books stand.
Fifteen questions about your business and your books. I read every one personally, and you get a straight answer about what it would take to make your season, your agreements and your jobs readable.