Nobody goes looking for a bookkeeper on a good week.
Something happened. The CPA called. The bank asked for statements. Somebody quit. A letter came. A job lost money and you can’t work out why.
Whichever one it was — you’re in the right place.
Bookkeeping for HVAC, plumbing, and electrical companies in Phoenix. That’s the whole business.
No pressure on the call. If all you want is a straight answer to one question, that’s a fine use of it.
Service and installs reported separately — the two numbers most trades books can’t tell apart.
Pick the one that sounds like your week.
He’s not going to fix them, and he shouldn’t have to. That’s this job.
The work stops the day they walk out. It doesn’t have to stop for long.
We find out what’s real, get the months caught up, and hand you something a lender can read.
Step one is knowing what your books actually say. Everything else gets easier after that.
That’s a reporting question. It has an answer.
Then the numbers need to hold up to somebody else reading them. Start now and it’s routine work.
The books are technically current and you just don’t believe them. That counts too.
It’s the same handful of things.
I work with contractors only. So the same problems keep showing up, and none of them are mysterious.
Your field software isn’t landing right in QuickBooks.
ServiceTitan and Housecall Pro are supposed to feed your accounting software. When that connection is set up slightly wrong, money goes into a holding bucket and never comes back out.
Your bank says one number. Your profit and loss says another. Nobody can explain the gap — because the gap isn’t in the books. It’s in the wiring between two programs.
I can get into both sides of that. Not just the books, the connection itself.
Service and installs are sitting in one revenue line.
A capacitor swap on a 115-degree Tuesday and a full changeout are two different businesses with two different margins. Lumped together, they average into a number that describes neither one.
That’s why “revenue’s up” and “I’m not sure I’m making money” can both be true at the same time.
The categories were never built for a contractor.
Accounting software ships with a generic list of buckets your money gets sorted into. Out of the box it has no idea what a permit is, or a callback, or a job that spans two months.
Somebody has been doing these books at night, after a full day, using the setup they were handed.
That’s a setup problem, not an effort problem. The fix is in the setup.
About whoever’s doing the books right now.
Probably your wife. Maybe your office manager. Maybe both, at night, after everything else is done.
She took it on because it needed doing. That’s not a small thing, and I’d say the same to her face.
I want to be clear about this: nobody is getting replaced.
She was handed a job with no training and a software setup that was never configured for contracting work. Anybody would be behind. She’s been holding a line that’s genuinely hard to hold.
What changes is the workload. I take the monthly matching against the bank, the categorizing, the catch-up, the closing, and the reports.
What stays with her is the part she’s actually good at and actually wants — the customers, the schedule, getting invoices out the door, answering the phone.
She keeps her job. She gets her evenings back.
And if she wants to stay in the books, that’s fine by me. I’ll walk her through exactly what I’m doing and why. Some people want to look every month. Some people want to never open QuickBooks again. Both work.
You don’t have to clean up before you call.
Here’s the thing that keeps people from picking up the phone: they figure they should get the books presentable first. Then they’d feel alright about showing someone.
That’s backwards, and it’s how a three-month problem quietly turns into a two-year one.
I’ve never once looked at a set of books and thought less of the person who runs the company. Books get behind because the business is busy. April through September in Phoenix, you’re dispatching, quoting, covering for a tech who didn’t show, and calming down a customer whose upstairs is 88 degrees. The books lose that fight every time.
Things I have heard, and shrugged at:
- I honestly don’t know the last time anyone looked at these.
- There are two files and I don’t know which one is right.
- The receipts are in a box. Some of them are in the truck.
- We stopped reconciling in 2023 and just kept going.
- I pay for QuickBooks and I’ve never opened it.
- I don’t know what any of this means and I’m tired of nodding.
None of that is a problem. All of it is normal. It’s just work, and it’s the work I do.
You don’t have to explain it, apologize for it, or straighten it up first. Send it exactly as it is.
What it looks like once it’s handled.
Same rhythm every month, April or October.
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Week one — nothing needed from you.
Bank, credit card, and loan activity comes over automatically. So does your ServiceTitan or Housecall Pro data.
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Week one into two — I go through it.
Every deposit gets matched against money that actually landed in your account, so nothing sits stuck in a placeholder bucket. Card fees, financing holdbacks, and split deposits get sorted where they belong. Vendor bills and material purchases get coded to the right job.
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One short list of questions, if I have any.
An unfamiliar charge, a check I can’t place. One list, not a trickle of texts while you’re on a roof. Usually five minutes of your time.
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Before the month is half over — the email.
- Profit and loss — service and installs on their own lines
- Balance sheet — what you own and what you owe, as of the last day of the month
- Job costing — what each job cost in labor, material, and equipment, and what was left
- A short note — a few sentences, plain words. What moved, what’s worth a look, anything that struck me as odd.
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The rest of the month, you don’t hear from me.
That’s the point. It’s already done.
And in January, your CPA gets a finished year — not a pile to reconstruct.
How this works.
Three steps. You can stop after any of them. Nothing rolls forward on its own.
Start here — free call
Free15 minutes. No pitch.
You tell me roughly what’s going on, I tell you whether I can help. If it’s not a fit, I’ll say so and point you somewhere better.
Step 1 — Books Check-Up
$350About a week. Credited toward cleanup.
You give me view-only access. I can look, I can’t change anything. Then you get a written document, in plain English:
- How far behind things actually are
- What hasn’t been matched against your bank statements, and how far back
- Whether ServiceTitan or Housecall Pro is posting correctly, and where money’s getting stuck if it isn’t
- What’s missing from the way your income and costs are sorted — and what that’s hiding
It’s yours to keep either way. Take it to somebody else and it’ll still be useful.
Step 2 — Catch-Up and Cleanup
$2,500–$4,000Two to four weeks. Fixed price.
The price is set before I start. It does not move partway through.
Every month gets matched line by line against your actual bank and card statements, until the books and the bank agree. The categories get rebuilt for a contracting company — service separate from installs, real material and labor costs, trucks and fuel and permits where they belong. The field software connection gets fixed at the source, not worked around.
You end up with a clean starting line. Everything after that builds on solid ground.
While it runs, nothing changes underfoot. Whoever’s been handling your books keeps doing them exactly as they have been. When the new setup is ready, I’ll walk them through what’s different — about half an hour, and it’s less work going forward, not more.
Step 3 — Monthly
$600–$1,600Depending on size. Month to month, no contract, no term, no cancellation fee.
Books closed in the first half of each month. Job costing. Service and installs reported separately. The plain-English note.
Your QuickBooks file is yours, in your name, and it stays that way. If you leave, you take everything and I’ll hand it over cleanly.
Who you’d be working with.
I’m one person, with contract help behind me for the heavy lifting on cleanups. You’ll always be talking to me. You won’t get handed off.
I came up in the trades.
Later I ran IT for a company doing north of $20 million, which is where I learned how these systems actually talk to each other — and exactly what breaks when they don’t. That’s an odd pair of jobs, and it’s exactly why the field-software-to-QuickBooks problem is the part I like best.
Trades only — HVAC, plumbing, electrical. That’s the whole list.
And I’m here. Phoenix, Mesa, Chandler, Gilbert, Glendale, Tempe, Scottsdale, Peoria, Surprise. I know what April through September does to your week, and I won’t put things on your plate in the middle of it.
— [NAME]
Straight answers
Do you do my taxes?
No, and that’s on purpose. I don’t prepare returns. My job is to make sure the books are right, then hand your CPA a clean year-end package so the return is straightforward. If you don’t have a CPA, I’ll point you toward a few here in the valley.
Do I have to switch software?
No. Stay on ServiceTitan or Housecall Pro. Stay on QuickBooks. I work with what you already have.
Do you need access to my bank accounts?
View-only for the Check-Up. I can read, not move anything. Ongoing, we set up whatever level you’re comfortable with. I prepare payments; you’re the one who releases them.
How much of my time does this take?
About fifteen minutes to set up view-only access. During cleanup I’ll have questions, but they come as one list. After that, a few minutes a month to read the note.
How bad is too bad?
There isn’t a too bad. Two years behind is a longer cleanup than three months behind. Same work either way — bigger stack, same job.
What if I’ve already got someone doing the books?
The Check-Up is a written picture of where things stand. Plenty of people use it just to know. What you do with it is up to you.
Am I locked in?
No. Month to month. If it stops being worth it, tell me and we’re done.
Set it down.
You’ve got enough on you. This doesn’t have to be part of it.
Take the fifteen minutes if you’d rather talk to a person first. Start the $350 Check-Up if you’d rather just know where things stand.
Either way, you’ll know more by next week than you do right now.
Or just call. [PHONE]