Industries · Plumbing
Accounting for Plumbing Companies
You find the leaks in a building, we find the ones in your P&L.
Plumbing companies in South Florida work every layer of the market: emergency calls in Kendall, cast-iron repipes in mid-century Miami homes, rough-in contracts on Broward townhome projects, and backflow testing for commercial accounts. Aging housing stock and constant development keep the phones ringing across all three counties. But the business behind the trade, deposits, draws, truck stock, permit fees, and crews spread across job sites, generates bookkeeping complexity that most plumbing owners never signed up to manage.
Each revenue stream misbehaves differently. Service work needs tight pricing against tech hours and callback costs. Repipe and remodel jobs collect deposits that must sit as liabilities, not profit. New-construction rough-ins bring progress draws, retainage, and general contractors who pay slowly while your supplier wants payment in thirty days. Mix in fixture inventory riding around in vans and the perennial W-2 versus 1099 question on helpers, and the ledger becomes as tangled as fifty-year-old drain lines.
Integris Accounting untangles it. We set up QuickBooks around your actual work types, keep deposits and draws classified correctly, run compliant payroll through ADP, and report margin by job and by division every month. Tax planning happens all year, so vehicle purchases, entity elections, and estimated payments are decisions you make deliberately. You run the crews; we make sure the numbers hold pressure.
The landscape
10,000+
plumbing businesses serving Florida homes and job sites
100+
municipalities across Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties
50+
years of age on much of the housing stock plumbers repipe here
Core services for plumbing
The challenges
What makes plumbing accounting hard
Deposits and draws distorting profit
Money collected before work begins is a liability, not income. Plumbing books that treat repipe deposits and construction draws as instant revenue show phantom profit, trigger overpaid taxes, and hide what you still owe in labor and materials.
Service pricing unmoored from cost
Between drive time, callbacks, and unapplied hours, a tech's billable day is shorter than it looks. Rates set by copying competitors instead of costing your own operation quietly starve the company.
Slow-paying GCs on rough-in work
New-construction contracts pay on draws with retainage held to the end, while your fixture and pipe suppliers do not wait. Without separate aging of contract receivables, the cash squeeze arrives unannounced.
Van inventory and material leakage
Fittings, valves, and fixtures scattered across trucks rarely get counted. Uncontrolled truck stock inflates cost of goods, conceals shrinkage, and makes every per-job margin number suspect.
Our approach
How we help
Work-type profit centers
Service, remodel, and new-construction revenue each report with their own costs, so you can see which division earns the best return on a crew-hour and price the others accordingly.
Deposit and draw accounting
Customer deposits and construction draws are tracked as liabilities and earned into revenue as work progresses, keeping your profit real and your tax position clean.
Receivables built for construction pay cycles
Contract balances, retainage, and service invoices age in separate buckets with monthly follow-up, so slow GC payments get chased early instead of discovered too late to fix.
True-cost service pricing support
We calculate fully loaded cost per tech-hour, wages, burden, truck, callbacks, and test your rate card against it, giving you evidence to raise prices with confidence.
Entity and tax structure for growth
From first LLC to S corporation election to multi-truck operations, we align your structure, owner pay, and quarterly estimates with where the business is actually headed.
FAQ
Plumbing accounting, common questions
I take 50 percent deposits on repipes. How should those hit my books?
As customer deposits, a liability account, until the work is performed. When the job progresses or completes, the deposit converts to revenue. Booked correctly, your monthly profit reflects work actually done, you avoid paying tax early on money you may still have to earn or refund, and your true backlog of obligations is visible. We configure QuickBooks so this happens automatically on every deposit invoice.
What percentage of revenue should a plumbing company spend on labor?
Benchmarks vary by mix, but most healthy shops land somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of revenue in direct labor before burden, with service-heavy companies running leaner per job and construction work running heavier. The more useful exercise is tracking your own labor efficiency monthly, billable hours versus paid hours per tech. We build that report so the benchmark that matters is your own trend line.
Do I charge sales tax on plumbing repairs in Florida?
Generally, repairs to real property are treated as improvements, you pay sales tax on the materials you buy and do not charge tax to the customer on the contract. Selling parts over the counter or certain tangible-property repairs flips the treatment. Mixed invoices are where audits find problems. We standardize your invoicing and purchasing so the tax treatment stays consistent across every kind of ticket you write.
When should a plumbing company move from a bookkeeper to a CPA firm?
When the numbers start driving decisions, hiring another crew, financing trucks, bidding bigger rough-in contracts, or wondering why profit does not match the bank account. A bookkeeper records history; we close your books monthly, plan your taxes before year-end, and sit with you to interpret what the numbers demand. Most plumbing clients come to us at that inflection point and wish they had switched sooner.
Where we serve plumbing
Talk to a CPA who knows plumbing
Stop guessing which jobs hold water, call (305) 497-0552 and put real numbers behind your plumbing business.