QuickBooks Cleanup · Electrical Contractors · South Carolina
A one-time QuickBooks cleanup for South Carolina electrical contractors. Job costing rebuilt, materials and permit fees put back on the jobs that incurred them, progress billing straightened out. Fixed scope, fixed price, and a date it is finished by. Monthly bookkeeping after that is your call, not a condition.
What we handle
From residential service to commercial build-outs, we keep your books clean and current and your monthly financials clear, so bidding and hiring decisions rest on real numbers.
Wire, panels, fixtures, and labor tracked against each job so you see real margin per project, not just revenue.
Material purchases separated from labor and overhead for accurate job and tax reporting.
Revenue recognized per milestone on larger jobs - not lumped in when the deposit lands.
Permit and inspection fees classified to the job, keeping G&A clean.
Deposits booked to a liability account until earned, so your income isn't overstated.
Subcontractors tracked year-round against the 2026 reporting threshold of $2,000.
Pricing
A cleanup is a one-time project — fixed scope, fixed price, and a date it is finished by. These are starting prices, not sight-unseen quotes; the exact figure is set after a free books diagnostic.
Monthly bookkeeping afterwards is optional, never a condition of the cleanup. Plans run $149 Starter, $299 Growth and $599 Scale per month — no setup fee, cancel any time. See how a cleanup works →
The detail
Electrical work sits across service, residential build and commercial contract work, and the accounting demands of those three are not the same.
A service call bills and closes inside a week. A commercial job runs for months, bills in stages, carries retainage, and often involves change orders that were verbally agreed long before anyone wrote them down.
Running both through the same simple invoice-and-collect pattern means long jobs show a sequence of profitable months followed by an unexplained bad one at the end.
This is the single most expensive habit in electrical contracting. The extra work gets done, the cost lands, and the change order is either never invoiced or invoiced at the original quoted rate. The job comes in under margin and the reason is invisible.
Change orders get tracked as their own line against the job, so the gap between what was quoted and what was actually built is visible while you can still do something about it. There is a fuller write-up in our guide to job-costing change orders in QuickBooks.
On commercial work, a percentage of each invoice is commonly held back until the job is signed off. Counting that as revenue when invoiced overstates the year and creates a tax bill on money not yet received.
Retainage is held separately and recognized when released — which for South Carolina contractors has its own timing rules worth understanding (more here).
Permits, inspections and plan review fees belong to the job that required them, not to general administration. Pushed into overhead, every job looks slightly more profitable than it was and overhead looks bloated for no traceable reason.
How a month runs
The same sequence every month, so you know when numbers land and what they will tell you.
Closes finish within 3–5 business days of receiving your documents. The gap between month end and a finished close is almost always waiting on statements or receipts, which is why document requests go out through a secure portal rather than email threads.
Common questions
Yes. Separating them is usually the single most useful change we make in an electrical file. They have different margins, different cash cycles and different risks — and once they are split, most owners find one is subsidising the other.
A cleanup is a one-time project and starts at $750, $1,800, $3,200 or $4,500 depending on scope. Those are starting prices, not sight-unseen quotes — the exact figure is confirmed after a free books diagnostic, and it is fixed before any work begins.
Monthly bookkeeping afterwards is optional, never a condition of the cleanup. Plans are $149 (Starter, up to 100 transactions), $299 (Growth, up to 400) and $599 (Scale, up to 1,000). Transactions above your plan cap bill at $0.50 each. Payroll processing and reporting are included with Growth and Scale. There is no setup fee and you can cancel at any time.
Usually less than people expect. We work inside your existing QuickBooks Online file rather than moving you onto proprietary software, so there is no migration and no lock-in. If you leave, the file is yours and it goes with you.
The first step is a review of what is already there, and nothing gets changed without telling you first. If the prior work is clean, we pick up from where it stands. If it is not, you will get a written scope before anyone starts fixing it.
Plenty of trades businesses do, and for a one-van operation with simple billing it can work. It stops working at the point where jobs overlap, subcontractors get involved, deposits arrive before work starts, and equipment purchases need capitalizing. That is usually where the books quietly stop reflecting reality — the bank balance looks fine while margin is leaking on jobs nobody has costed.
The test is simple: if you cannot say which of last quarter's jobs made money, the books are not doing their job yet.
Tell us about your business and get a free books diagnostic - no call required, no obligation.
Get your free books diagnostic →Tell us where the books stand today. You'll get a written assessment and a fixed-price quote within one business day — no call required.
Prefer to talk? Email hello@flowbookkeepingservices.com or call (843) 749-8691.
Expect an email from hello@flowbookkeepingservices.com within one business day.