Bookkeeping for Electrical Contractors

Electrical contracting has one of the widest margin spreads in the trades. Residential service calls run 45–55% gross margin. Commercial competitive bid work runs 20–30%. If your books report a single blended number, you cannot tell which half of your business is funding the other.

Steph's Books provides outsourced bookkeeping for electrical contractors across the country. We handle job costing, certified payroll, retainage, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and monthly financial statements — configured for how electrical contractors actually work.

Why Electrical Bookkeeping Is Different

Labor Tiers Break Blended Rates

A three-person crew might pair a master electrician at $48/hour, a journeyman at $34/hour, and an apprentice at $20/hour. The blended average looks like $34/hour — but a residential panel upgrade staffed by the journeyman and apprentice actually costs about $27/hour, while a commercial job needing the master and journeyman costs about $41/hour.

Bid both at the blended rate and you overprice the residential work you would win and underprice the commercial work you do win. We cost labor by license tier, fully burdened, so your estimates reflect who is actually on the truck. Our electrical job costing guide walks through the calculation.

Materials Follow the Crew, Not the Job

A crew picks up $1,800 of wire and fittings on a purchase order referencing a commercial tenant improvement, then uses half of it on a residential panel upgrade across town. Nothing was stolen and nothing was wasted — but two jobs are now misreported, and the pattern repeats every week.

We build purchasing and coding workflows that keep material costs attached to the job that consumed them, so your margins survive contact with the supply house.

Certified Payroll and Prevailing Wage

The Davis-Bacon Act applies to federal construction contracts over $2,000, and electrical scope on a single large public project can reach several million dollars. Every hour on that scope needs prevailing wage rates, correct fringe benefit treatment, and a weekly WH-347 certified payroll report.

Getting this wrong risks withheld payment and debarment, not just a correction. We handle prevailing wage and certified payroll alongside your regular payroll so public and private work reconcile to the same books.

Overtime Is Now a Payroll Compliance Question

Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, nonexempt workers can exclude up to $12,500 in qualified overtime compensation from federal taxable income. For an electrician working 10–15 hours of overtime a week on data center buildouts or EV infrastructure, that is real money — but only if your payroll system separates the overtime premium from base pay correctly.

Most payroll setups do not track it that way by default. We make sure yours reports the qualified portion properly.

Retainage and Progress Billing

Commercial work commonly holds 5–10% retainage until closeout, and progress billing spreads revenue across months that rarely line up with when costs land. Booked as ordinary receivables, retainage quietly overstates the cash you can actually spend.

We track retainage separately, age it, and reconcile progress billings so your balance sheet distinguishes money earned from money you can use.

Vehicles, Tools, and Section 179

Electrical contractors leave a lot on the table here. A bucket truck over 6,000 lbs GVWR can be expensed in year one under Section 179, and tools under the $2,500 de minimis safe harbor can be expensed rather than depreciated. We track fixed assets so these elections are available at year end instead of discovered afterwards.

Electrical Contractor Benchmarks

These are the figures we measure your books against, drawn from NECA benchmarking and BLS wage data:

• Net profit margin — below 4% bottom quartile, 4–8% average, 8–12% top quartile
• Gross margin — residential service — 40–48% average, 48–55% top quartile
• Gross margin — commercial time & material — 35–42% average, 42–50% top quartile
• Gross margin — commercial bid work — 18–25% average, 25–32% top quartile
• Revenue per electrician — $130K–$200K average, $200K–$300K top quartile
• Overhead percentage — 28–35% average, 20–28% top quartile
• Billable utilization — 55–65% average, 65–75% top quartile

The 8% net margin floor is the number worth internalizing. On $2.5MM in revenue, the difference between a 4% and a 10% net margin is roughly $150,000 a year in profit — and about $12,500 a month in cash available to the owner.

Software We Work With

Most electrical contractors run QuickBooks alongside field service software such as ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, or FieldEdge, plus an estimating package like Accubid or ConEst. Those integrations are useful and imperfect. We reconcile what the field software exports against what QuickBooks records, so a sync error does not quietly become a reporting error. See our QuickBooks setup guide for electrical contractors for how we structure the chart of accounts.