Free Financial Tools for HVAC, Plumbing, & Electrical Contractors
Calculators, scorecards, and templates to find the leaks in your own books.
The same ones we run inside a full Profit Leak Audit. No cost, no catch.
Sales don't guarantee profit. You can run busy crews all season and still be broke at month's end. The answer is almost always hiding in the numbers. Everything below helps you find it yourself. Start wherever your gut says you're bleeding.
See Where You're Bleeding
Two quick self-checks. One tests whether your cash flow is healthy; the other tests whether your books are hiding money. Be honest as most owners find at least a couple that sting.
Cash Flow Leak Scorecard
Check every statement that applies to your business. You will get a score and a straight read on where your cash flow stands.
We will walk through your results together and find the biggest leaks to plug.
What's Broken in Your Books
You do not need a CFO to spot the biggest financial leaks, just a closer look. These seven red flags show up over and over in trades businesses making $300K to $8M a year. Check the ones that sound like you.
In a Profit Leak Audit we map these issues to your business using your actual books.
Cash Flow Headache Guide (PDF)
The eight cash-flow mistakes that quietly drain trades businesses:
Slow invoicing
Poor Expense Tracking
Seasonality
Paying vendors too fast
Relying on financing
No tax reserve
Inaccurate job costing and margins
No forecast
The exact fix for each in a PDF field guide you can act on this week.
Run the Numbers
Your techs cost more than their wage, and a job can look profitable while quietly losing money. Run yours through these two, then use the spreadsheet to give every dollar a job.
Labor Burden Calculator
Your techs cost far more than their hourly wage. This finds the true loaded cost per billable hour, then the rate you need to charge to hit your target margin.
Company defaults
Field technicians (field techs only, no office staff or owner)
| Name | Wage ($/hr) | Hours/wk |
|---|
Annual overhead (costs that exist with zero field techs: office staff, owner salary, rent, software, marketing, insurance)
Estimate only. Uses FICA 7.65% and FUTA 0.6% federal plus your state's typical rate. Confirm your actual workers' comp and state rates against your policy and pay stubs.
Job Costing & Margin Calculator
Enter what a job actually costs and what you charged. See your true gross margin, checked against healthy trades benchmarks. Pull your loaded labor rate from the calculator above.
Profit First Allocation
A scriptless Profit First allocation spreadsheet:
Set your percentages once
Enter each deposit
And it tells you exactly how much to move to Owner's Pay, Profit, Taxes, and Operating.
Set Up Clean Books
Garbage in, garbage out. Misclassified expenses give you wrong margins; wrong COGS gives you wrong pricing. Clean books start with three things:
The right account structure
Consistent categorization
A monthly close that verifies it all.
This is the structure behind clean margins, accurate labor efficiency, and a valuation buyers trust. Download the full account-by-account template below and use it as your starting point.
Month-End Close Checklist
Phase 1 — Prep & Capture
Don't start a close on incomplete data.
- Pull all bank, credit card, and loan statements for the period
- Capture all receipts and bills in Dext/HubDoc and match to QBO
- Process payroll and post the payroll journal for the period
- Confirm beginning balances match last month's ending balances
Phase 2 — Categorize & Clean
- Ensure all bank feed categorization is complete in QBO
- Match inter-account transfers so Profit First moves aren't doubled as income or expense
- Clear all uncategorized transactions
- Confirm every transaction has a payee
- Clear and match Undeposited Funds. This is the number-one place trades cash goes missing
- Review and empty "Uncategorized" & "Ask My Accountant" accounts
Phase 3 — Reconcile
- Reconcile all bank accounts and credit cards
- Reconcile loans and notes to the lender statement
- Reconcile sales tax payable and payroll clearing accounts
- Reconcile FSM sales to revenue, and FSM payments to A/R. Close the FSM (ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber) period once reconciliation is complete
- Drive all clearing and suspense accounts to zero
Phase 4 — Adjusting Entries
- Post inventory journal entries
- Post the month's depreciation entryPro help
- Amortize prepaid expensesPro help
- Review owner's equity to ensure draws and contributions are booked right with no expenses miscoded to equity
Phase 5 — Compliance
- Review vendor payments, confirm W-9s on file, flag vendors nearing the 1099 threshold
- Accrue sales and use tax correctlyPro help
Phase 6 — Review & Report
- Check P&L and balance sheet variance against budget
- Compare month-over-month and same-month-last-year to catch creep
- Scan for negative or abnormal balances
- Review A/R and A/P aging past 30, 60, and 90 days
- Sanity-check gross margin by job type
- Update the KPI scorecard (net, gross, labor efficiency, overhead %, AR/AP days)
- Review the cash flow statement
Phase 7 — Finalize
The control step most DIY closes skip.
- Attach supporting documents to entries
- Set the closing date and password in QBO so the period locks
- Deliver the management report to the owner
The Pro help steps like depreciation, prepaids, and use-tax accrual, are easy to check off and still get wrong. If any of those are fuzzy, that's exactly what a free Profit Leak Audit is for. Download the working checklist below and run your close against it every month.
Can You Categorize From the Bank Feed?
This is what your books actually show you: a vendor and an amount, nothing else. Sometimes that is enough. Often it is a trap, and the only honest move is to pull the receipt. Can you tell which is which?
How would you categorize this?
Rule 1: categorize by purpose, not vendor name
Rule 2: the bank feed can only be trusted for single-purpose vendors
The call that makes or breaks your margin: COGS vs. overhead
Where does it go? Common trades feed lines
| Purchase | Where it goes |
|---|---|
| Equipment & materials installed on a job | COGS – Job Materials |
| Permits pulled for a job | COGS – Permits |
| Subcontractor on a job | COGS – Subcontractor |
| Field technician wages, taxes, workers' comp | COGS – Direct Labor |
| Merchant & consumer-financing fees | COGS – Merchant / Financing Fees |
| Shop rags, gloves, nitrogen, consumables | COGS – Shop Stock |
| A tool used across many jobs | Small Tools & Equipment (overhead) |
| Truck fuel, repairs, insurance | Vehicle & Truck Expense (overhead) |
| Office paper, ink, postage | Office Supplies (overhead) |
| Dispatch / accounting / office software | Software (overhead) |
| Payroll processing fees (e.g. "ADP FEES") | Payroll Processing Fees (overhead) — not a payroll liability |
| Google Ads, Angi, direct mail, signage | Advertising & Marketing (overhead) |
Note: we book merchant and consumer-financing fees to COGS, not bank charges because they are a direct cost of getting paid on a job, and keeping them in COGS makes your true job margin honest.
Three things that are NOT expenses Pro help
These three are the most common way a profitable trades business looks broke on paper. If any are fuzzy, that is exactly what a free Profit Leak Audit untangles.
Know Your Numbers: Trades Benchmarks
You don't need to guess what healthy looks like. These are the numbers we check when we review a trades business in the $300K-$8M range. Start with the benchmarks, then carve out the best targets for your mix.
Benchmarks for trades businesses in the $300K-$8M range. Your best targets inside these ranges shift with your mix of service, maintenance, and install. Updated 2026.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is a labor burden rate for an HVAC, plumbing, or electrical technician?
Labor burden is the true hourly cost of a field technician once you add payroll taxes, workers' comp, health insurance, retirement, and other benefits on top of their wage, then divide by the hours they can actually bill after holidays, PTO, training, and shop time. For most trades techs the loaded cost runs roughly 1.5 to 1.7 times the nominal hourly wage, so a technician paid $35 an hour often costs $50 to $60 an hour of billable time.
What is a healthy net profit margin for a trades business?
For HVAC, plumbing, and electrical businesses in the $300K to $8M range, a net profit margin of 8 to 18 percent or higher is a healthy target. Under 8 percent usually means you are carrying most of the risk for very little reward, and the fix is typically in pricing, job efficiency, or overhead.
How do I know if my books are costing me money?
The most common signs are not knowing your margin by job type, paying vendors before collecting from customers, vague catch-all expense categories, skipping your own pay in slow months, and making spending decisions off your bank balance instead of what is already committed. Our free What's Broken in Your Books diagnostic and Cash Flow Leak Scorecard on this page walk you through the specific red flags.
Are these financial tools really free?
Yes. Every calculator, scorecard, and template on this page is free to use. They are DIY versions of what we run inside Accounting 4 Trades. If you would rather we run the numbers on your actual books, you can book a free Profit Leak Audit and we will do it with you.
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We stand by our work—no excuses, no fine print. If you're not 100% satisfied within the first 90 days, we'll refund up to 50% of one-time investments or 100% of recurring service fees. Your success is our priority, and we’re confident in delivering results that matter.
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