Don’t Combine These Job Types—It’s Costing You Thousands
Commercial work is all just lumped together in our books. Is that a problem?
Mareaka, we’re running service calls, new installs, and even some commercial work—but it’s all just lumped together in our books. Is that a problem?
Yes—and it could be costing you more than you think.
If your business has grown beyond one truck and one crew, treating all your jobs the same on paper is like driving with a fogged-up windshield.
You can kind of see where you're going... but you're missing what's really happening under the hood.
Let’s break down why separating your job types—residential, commercial, installs, service—matters more than ever when you're past the $500K mark.
Before we dive into it, let me introduce myself if we haven’t met yet.
I’m Mareaka from Bunch Accounting, and I specialize in helping roofing and HVAC business owners like you make confident, profitable decisions.
Why Mixing Job Types Creates Confusion (and False Confidence)
Every type of job has its own cost structure and timing:
Residential jobs might be high-volume but lower-margin, with quicker turnarounds
Commercial work often has longer billing cycles, upfront permitting costs, and higher overhead
Service calls are great for cash flow, but eat up crew bandwidth fast
Install projects may look profitable until you factor in callbacks or unbilled extras
When you lump all these together in your books, you get blended margins that don’t tell the full story.
That makes it almost impossible to:
Price jobs accurately
Staff the right crews
See which jobs are truly profitable
What the Best-Performing Contractors Do Differently
The most profitable contractors over $500K do one thing most others don’t:
They track job types separately.
They break out their residential installs from their commercial service calls.
They run separate P\&Ls, compare gross margins, and set benchmarks by job type.
Why? Because they know that:
A 48% margin on service calls doesn’t mean installs are performing the same
One service line might be carrying the whole business (or dragging it down)
They can’t afford to guess when it's time to hire or reprice
How to Break It Out in QuickBooks or Xero
The good news? You don’t need a new system—just better structure.
Use the tools you already have:
Classes or Locations (QuickBooks Online): Tag each invoice or expense as "Residential Install," "Commercial Service," etc.
Tracking Categories (Xero): Set up job types as custom fields
Project codes or customer types (other software): Anything that lets you group by service type
Once you do this, you can run clean profit reports by job type every month—and finally see what’s working.
Get Your Free Guide
Decisions You Can’t Make Without This Clarity
If you don’t know which jobs are making money, you’re flying blind when it comes to:
Hiring: Should you hire another service tech or an install crew?
Crew allocation: Are you putting your best guys on the highest-margin work?
Pricing adjustments: Are some jobs overdue for a price increase
Marketing: Are you pushing ads for services that don’t actually make money?
Without this insight, it’s easy to scale the wrong parts of your business.
Want to Clean This Up and See the Truth?
We help contractors set up tracking and reporting that finally shows which jobs are profitable—not just what’s in the bank account.
Book a Profit and Tax Analysis We’ll review your books, help you separate job types, and show you exactly where your margins are hiding (or slipping).
Let us know what you think in the comments!
