#trades
Track trades, investments, and portfolio transactions
Louisiana's HB 953 dissolves the State Plumbing Board on January 1 — journeyman hours drop from 7,000 to 2,500 and the apprentice ratio rises to 1:3.
Backflow testers bill $70-$300 per assembly on a mandated annual retest cycle - track calibration, registrations and prepaid plans as their own ledger lines.
Price custom woodwork from true costs — 15–25% material markup, overhead per billable hour, 10–20% profit — not a materials-times-three guess.
A mobile welder quoting $90 an hour often spends $20–$35 of every arc hour on shielding gas, wire, and abrasives alone. This guide shows how to book consumables as direct job costs, build a true cost per arc hour, price the non-arc hours around it, and keep the rig, mileage, and Section 179 records that hold up at tax time.
A security camera installer runs three businesses out of one bank account — installs, monitoring contracts, and truck stock. This guide covers job-costing installs as separate equipment and labor buckets, booking monitoring fees as deferred revenue, cycle-counting truck inventory, budgeting licensing and certifications, and the eight monthly KPIs that decide what the company is worth.
A watch or clock repair shop's books must treat customer timepieces as bailments (never inventory), consigned parts as off-balance-sheet goods, and deposits as liabilities until pickup. This guide covers how AWCI CW21 certification should show up in the rate card, work-in-process for movements sent to specialists, warranty reserves for comebacks, Section 179 on bench equipment, sales tax on parts vs. labor, and the KPIs — revenue per bench hour, comeback rate, parts-to-labor ratio — that predict breakeven.
A bookkeeping guide for window screen and screen door repair businesses. Separate revenue lines for rescreens, frame rebuilds, doors and landlord contracts; track mesh by grade (fiberglass, aluminum, solar, pet-resistant) as cost of goods sold; log mileage per stop at the 2026 IRS rate of 72.5 to 76 cents; and bank spring surplus to cover three to four months of fixed costs through winter.
Effective January 1, 2026, California SB 517 amends Business and Professions Code Section 7159 to require every home improvement contract to include a yes/no subcontractor checkbox, a statutory disclaimer when the answer is yes, and that same disclaimer on every change order — with the prime contractor still responsible for completing the job.
Residential duct cleaning runs roughly $25–$50 per supply vent (about $75 for returns) and dryer vent add-ons average $145, so a one-line invoice hides your margin. This guide itemizes base fees, vent counts and add-ons, costs the four buckets behind each job, capitalizes a $9,000 vacuum rig instead of expensing it as supplies, and tracks the five KPIs — revenue per vent, revenue per tech-hour, upsell attach rate, callback rate, revenue per truck per day — that decide whether the next rig pays for itself.
How a fire extinguisher service company should structure its books around the NFPA 10 calendar — separate revenue lines for annual tags, recharges, 6-year internal maintenance ($30–$60 per unit) and hydrostatic testing ($20–$100 per unit), deferred revenue for prepaid contracts, MACRS depreciation for vans and recharge rigs, and the route-density KPIs that decide whether the truck earns money.
How elevator service companies job-cost full-maintenance and exam-and-lube contracts per unit — booking prepayments as deferred revenue, costing callbacks at a burdened CET mechanic rate of 85 to 100 dollars an hour rather than the 52-dollar wage, carrying truck stock as inventory, and pricing renewals from twelve months of callback history.
A roofing WIP schedule ties revenue to work actually completed rather than to when you invoiced — percent complete equals costs to date divided by total estimated costs, and earned revenue equals percent complete times revised contract price. This guide walks a $192,000 TPO re-roof through the math, explains over- versus under-billing, retainage receivable and warranty accruals, and covers when Section 460 forces percentage-of-completion for tax (roughly $31 million in average gross receipts for 2026, or contracts running past two years).
