Painting runs on labor. Crews, day workers, and 1099 subs make up the bulk of what a job costs, and a generic bookkeeper has no framework to tie those costs back to the work that generated them. Here is how trade-native bookkeeping handles a painting business.
A painting business looks simple from the outside: buy paint, apply it, collect the check. In the books it is considerably messier. Day labor, 1099 subs, crew wages, and job-site material draws all need to land in the right place for the month to make sense. When a generalist drops all of it into "wages" and "supplies," you lose visibility into which job types actually pay and which ones are quietly draining the shop.
We set up Class or Location tracking in QuickBooks so every job carries its own labor, materials, and subcontractor cost. That turns a vague sense of being busy into a Job Profit view: the big commercial repaint that ran long, the residential route that quietly carries the shop, and the builder work where thin margins only pencil out on volume. On the Crew plan and up, that visibility is part of every monthly close.
A customer deposit on a large exterior or commercial job is a liability until the work is done. Book it as income on day one and your revenue is overstated, your job cost is understated, and your progress billing schedule falls apart. A trade-native bookkeeper knows the right timing.
When crew wages and day-labor payments are lumped into a single labor expense, you have no way to know whether the residential crew or the commercial crew is making money. Painting is labor-heavy enough that costing each person to each job is the only way to see real margin.
Specialty subs, day workers, and lead painters who hit the 1099 threshold each need a W-9 and a running payment total tracked all year. Catch it at filing time and you are chasing missing tax IDs under a deadline instead of confirming clean numbers.
Yes. We set up Class or Location tracking so each job carries its own labor, materials, and subcontractor cost. You see job-level profit broken out by job type on the Crew plan and up.
Deposits are recorded as a liability when received and recognized as income as work is completed. That keeps your revenue timing accurate and your progress billing schedule clean, which matters especially on larger commercial and builder jobs.
Paint, primer, caulk, masking tape, and plastic are job materials that flow into cost of goods for that job. Sprayers, ladders, and scaffolding are durable equipment and tracked separately as tool expense or fixed assets, so job margins and depreciation both stay accurate.
We collect W-9s, track payments to each sub and day worker through the year, and prepare 1099 totals so January is a confirmation rather than a scramble. Full 1099 filing support is included on the Shop plan.
Yes. We set up classes for each job type so you can compare margins across residential repaints, commercial contracts, and new-construction builder work. Each segment carries different cost structures and volume assumptions, and mixing them hides what is actually working.
Always. We work inside your own QuickBooks Online subscription. If you ever leave, you keep the file and a clean set of workpapers. No proprietary ledger, no hostage data.
Trade-native categories, job costing, and a CPA-reviewed close by the 15th. You keep your QuickBooks file.