A CPA's guide to bookkeeping for electrical contractors & electricians: chart of accounts, job costing with worked numbers, supply-house reconciliation, WIP, KPIs and the monthly close.
By Ruben Garratt, CPA · Division 26 CPA · Updated September 2026
Bookkeeping for electrical contractors and electricians is a different sport from keeping books for a store or an office. Your money lives in jobs - materials bought this week, labor burned this month, retainage released next quarter. If your books can't tell you what each job actually cost, they're not telling you anything. This guide covers how a CPA sets up and runs bookkeeping for an electrical contracting business, from the chart of accounts to the weekly routine, with the numbers that matter and the Carolina-specific rules that catch people out.
Four things break generic bookkeeping the moment you apply it to an electrical shop: progress billing (you invoice in draws, not at delivery), retainage (5-10% of every commercial job held until closeout), supply-house accounts (hundreds of line items a month across Rexel, CED, Graybar, City Electric), and crews (labor that must land on the right job, with burden, or your margins are fiction). A bookkeeper who doesn't build around these four will produce tidy-looking books that are wrong where it counts.
Skip the default software template. An electrical contractor's chart of accounts should separate, at minimum:
The single most common mistake we fix is overhead sitting inside cost of goods sold. Put your truck insurance and your office rent in COGS and every job looks worse than it is, which is how shops end up bidding high and losing work they should have won.
Every dollar of cost should carry a job name. Labor with burden, materials from the supply house, subs, rentals - all coded to the job, ideally by cost code (rough-in, trim, service). Do that consistently and your books start answering the questions that grow a shop: which GCs are worth bidding, which project types quietly lose money, and whether your bid margins survive contact with reality. This is the core of our job costing & WIP reporting service - and the single biggest difference between contractor bookkeeping and the generic kind.
Here's the part most shops get wrong. You pay a journeyman $32 an hour, so you bid the job at $32 an hour of cost. But the real cost includes employer payroll taxes, workers comp (an expensive class code in electrical), general liability, and any benefits or PTO. Depending on your comp rate and benefits, burden commonly adds somewhere in the region of 25% to 40% on top of base wage.
Run that through an illustrative 400-hour commercial job:
On a job you bid at a 20% margin, that gap can consume most of the profit. Multiply it across a year of jobs and it explains the shop that stays busy and never has cash. Burden is not an accounting technicality; it is the difference between a bid that works and one that doesn't.
Supply-house accounts move too fast for a monthly look. Weekly, match every statement line to a job: catch mis-billed items, capture return credits (they go missing constantly), and keep true material cost per job current. A simple PO or job-name discipline at the counter - every ticket tagged before it's picked up - makes this ten times easier.
This is the step almost every generic bookkeeper skips, and it is where real money hides. Unreturned material sitting on a statement, a credit that never posted, an order billed to the wrong job - each one is small, and across a year they add up to a number worth chasing. It also has a second-order effect: if material is coded to the wrong job, then every margin figure you're using to bid the next job is wrong too.
Invoice draws on schedule, record retainage in its own account the moment it's withheld, and calendar every release date. Know your mechanic's-lien deadlines in your state so a slow GC never turns earned money into a write-off. We wrote a full breakdown in our guide to retainage and cash flow.
Work-in-progress reporting compares what you've earned on each open job against what you've billed. The mechanic is simple: divide costs incurred to date by total estimated costs to get percent complete, multiply that by the contract value to get revenue earned, then compare it to what you've actually invoiced.
If you've spent $60,000 of an estimated $100,000 in cost on a $140,000 contract, you're 60% complete and have earned $84,000. Billed $95,000? You're over-billed by $11,000 - you're holding cash you haven't earned, and a squeeze is coming at closeout. Billed $70,000? You're under-billed by $14,000 and financing your GC out of your own pocket.
Under-billing is the quieter problem and the more dangerous one, because the business feels fine until the cash runs out. Sureties and lenders will ask for a WIP schedule the moment you bid bonded or larger commercial work - having a clean one is often the difference between growing your bond line and being capped.
Crew labor needs burden allocated to jobs, not parked in overhead - that's the point of section 2 above. If you bid public work, certified or prevailing-wage payroll has its own weekly filing rhythm and its own labor classifications. And every subcontractor who crosses $600 in a year gets a 1099 - late or missing filings are one of the easiest penalties to avoid, and one of the most common we see.
A note on scope: processing payroll and filing payroll tax returns is a separate function, usually handled by a dedicated payroll provider. What your bookkeeping has to do is take that payroll data and land it on the right jobs with the right burden. Those are two different jobs and it's worth being clear which one you're buying.
For most electrical contractors, QuickBooks Online is the hub - it's what nearly every accountant, lender and surety can work with. Pair it with your field software (dispatch, estimating, time tracking) and make sure the sync is actually mapping costs to jobs, not just dumping totals. ServiceTitan, Procore, JobTread and Housecall Pro all integrate, but an integration that posts a lump sum to a single income account has given you nothing. Check what it actually writes before you trust it. Software doesn't replace the discipline above - it just makes it faster.
Books that follow this rhythm are always lender-ready - and tax season becomes a non-event.
Once the books are clean, a short list of figures tells you almost everything. Targets vary by market and mix, so treat these as starting points to measure your own trend against rather than universal rules:
A few state-level items catch out-of-state bookkeepers:
Clean job-costed books are what make real tax strategy possible: S-corp salary planning, Section 179 and bonus depreciation timed to equipment and vehicle purchases, and quarterly estimates that match how cash actually flows through draws and retainage.
Vehicles are worth singling out, because electrical shops buy a lot of them. The deduction available on a work vehicle depends heavily on its weight class and how exclusively it's used for business - a cargo van kitted out for the trade is treated very differently from a pickup that also does school runs. Timing the purchase against a strong year, rather than buying in December because someone said to, is where the actual saving is. That's why we pair every bookkeeping engagement with year-round tax planning - the savings live in the books, not in April.
Early on, many electricians run their own books at night - workable until job volume makes coding sloppy. A part-time bookkeeper helps, if they truly know job costing (here's how to vet one). The step most growing shops eventually take is outsourced accounting - books, job costing, 1099s and tax in one engagement. We broke down what that costs in the Carolinas.
If you're a one- or two-truck electrician doing service calls and panel upgrades, the same rules apply at a smaller scale. You won't need WIP schedules, but you still need three things: every supply-house ticket coded to the job it was bought for, a truck-stock account so parts pulled from inventory land on the right job, and service revenue kept separate from any new-construction or remodel work so you can see which side actually pays. Review profit by call type - service call, panel upgrade, EV charger install - every month, and set tax aside from every deposit instead of at year end. Most shops this size can run all of it in QuickBooks Online with a field app syncing invoices in. The routine matters more than the software.
Weekly. Monthly is the common default and it's too slow for job-costed work - by the time you see that a job went sideways, the job is finished and you've already bid two more off the same bad assumptions.
You can run it, but the default chart of accounts won't produce job-level margin. The setup work - a contractor chart of accounts, job and cost-code structure, retainage accounts, burden allocation - is what makes the software useful. That's a one-time job that pays for itself repeatedly.
Job costing tells you what a job cost. WIP reporting tells you where an unfinished job stands right now - earned versus billed. You need job costing from your first crew; you need WIP once jobs run across months or you start bidding bonded work.
Treat cleanup as its own project with its own timeline and fee, separate from ongoing bookkeeping. Trying to run forward on a broken foundation just produces confident-looking numbers that are wrong. Most catch-ups take 30 to 90 days depending on volume and how much documentation survived.
Different jobs. A bookkeeper records what happened. A CPA plans what happens next and signs the return. Small shops often start with the first and add the second at tax time - the friction comes when the two aren't working from the same books, which is the case for handing both to one firm.
Division 26 CPA does bookkeeping services for electrical contractors in NC & SC exclusively - weekly books, supply-house reconciliation, job costing and WIP, paired with year-round tax strategy, across North and South Carolina. See our packages or book a consultation and we'll review your current setup, job by job.
This article is general information, not tax advice; tax treatment depends on your specific facts and on current law. Please consult a CPA about your situation.
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