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Common questions
Pricing, cleanup, job costing, subcontractors, security. If the answer you need is not here, email us and we will write it down properly rather than book a call.
Pricing and plans
Monthly plans are flat-rate and based on transaction volume, not hours:
There is no setup fee and no contract. A transaction is any line that has to be categorized and reconciled — a card swipe, a check, a deposit, a bill payment.
Overage is billed at $0.50 per transaction above your plan cap. We do not silently upgrade you. If you run over the cap two or three months in a row, we will tell you and move you to the tier that actually costs you less.
No to both. Plans are month to month, there is no onboarding charge, and you can cancel at any time. The books stay yours — they live in your own QuickBooks Online file, not in software we control.
Cleanup is priced by tier based on how far behind the books are, not by the hour:
These are starting prices, not sight-unseen flat quotes. Your exact price is set after the free books review, and you see it in writing before any work begins.
Months behind is the starting point, but it is not the whole answer. A file that is three months behind but has a tangled chart of accounts, unreconciled bank feeds going back two years, and personal spending mixed in is not a Light cleanup. That is what the free books review is for: we look at the actual file and quote the actual work.
Getting started
Start with the free books review. You give us read access to your QuickBooks Online file, we go through it properly, and we send back a written plain-English report: what is clean, what is broken, what it would take to fix, and what that costs. No credit card, no obligation. If you read it and decide to fix it yourself, the report is still yours.
No. The whole review happens over email. That is deliberate — most contractors reading this are on a job site, and a scheduled thirty-minute call is a worse experience than a written report you can read at seven in the evening.
A typical monthly close takes 3–5 business days after we have your documents. The first month is usually longer because we are also setting up the chart of accounts, job costing, and any rules your file needs. If a cleanup has to happen first, the timeline depends on the cleanup scope and we quote it up front.
No. We work inside your existing QuickBooks Online file. There is no proprietary portal holding your ledger hostage, and if you leave, your books do not go anywhere.
We will set it up. That includes a chart of accounts built for your trade rather than the generic default, job costing structure, bank and card feeds, and migration of your opening balances. This is quoted separately from the monthly plan.
Trades and job costing
Job costing is the point. Revenue, materials, subcontractor invoices, equipment time, and permit fees get tagged to the job they belong to, so you can look at a finished project and see what it really made. A bookkeeper who only categorizes transactions can tell you that you spent $40,000 at the supply house. They cannot tell you which jobs lost money.
Yes, and we track them through the year rather than scrambling in January. That means W-9s collected before a sub is paid, payments accumulated per vendor, and a running list of who is going to cross the reporting threshold. Note that the federal threshold changed for 2026 — it is now $2,000 rather than $600. We wrote that up in detail on the 1099 threshold page.
A deposit is a liability until you have earned it, not revenue on the day it lands. Booking deposits straight to income is one of the most common errors in trade contractors' books, and it produces two bad outcomes: a month that looks more profitable than it was, and a tax bill on money you may still owe back.
Retainage held back on your invoices should not sit in your books as ordinary receivables, and by default we do not recognize it as revenue until it is released. Mixed into normal A/R it makes your aging report meaningless. There is more detail on our retainage page, including how South Carolina treats it on state work.
Yes. Progress billing changes how your profit and loss statement should be read, because billed is not the same as earned and neither is the same as collected. We set the books up so those three numbers are separable, and we explain the difference in this guide.
HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, and general contracting are the core. We also work with landscaping, remodeling, painting, and other home-service and trade businesses that run job costing, supplier invoices, and subcontractor spend.
Scope of service
Payroll processing is included with the Growth and Scale plans. Starter clients can add it as an optional service.
No. Flow Bookkeeping Services is a bookkeeping firm, not a CPA firm, and we do not give tax or legal advice. What we do is hand your CPA a clean, reconciled, job-costed set of books in the format they actually want, which usually makes their work faster and their invoice smaller.
No. We prepare the books your tax preparer works from, and we will coordinate directly with them at year end so you are not the one forwarding spreadsheets back and forth.
We work remotely inside your own QuickBooks Online file, so location does not limit service. The firm is built for South Carolina contractors — Charleston, North Charleston, Mount Pleasant, Summerville, Columbia, Greenville, and Myrtle Beach.
Security and access
Our security priorities are SOC 2-aligned controls, TLS 1.3 encryption, GDPR-aligned practices, personally identifiable information redacted before any AI processing, read-only bank integrations, and logically isolated client data.
No, and you should never send a password to any bookkeeper by email or text. Bank and card connections are made by you, from your own login, as read-only feeds. We get accountant-level access to your QuickBooks Online file, which you grant and can revoke yourself at any time.
You can cancel any time. Because everything lives in your own QuickBooks Online file, nothing has to be migrated or exported when you go — we simply hand back full control and remove our access.
Keep reading
Longer answers to the questions that come up once you are actually running the books.
The step most contractors skip, and why it quietly ruins project margin.
Read the guide →Why retainage does not belong in ordinary accounts receivable.
Read the guide →What the 2026 change means, and why it does not mean less record-keeping.
Read the guide →Send us your QuickBooks Online file and we will tell you exactly what is wrong with it — free, in plain English, with no call required.
Get your free books review →