Master Your Business Finances Webinar Part 1 (Oct. 2025)

We ran these polls before we started, and everybody was all over the place.

So we asked who knew, their accurate overhead.

We asked, where do you do your job costing?

In the CRM or in QuickBooks?

Can't remember the other question, but the answers were all over the place.

So, like, there's a lot of people out there that don't know their overhead confidently, and we're honest about it.

there's a lot of people that sort of job costs in the CRM.

And I say sort of with quotation marks because in my opinion, and there's differing opinions on this and, like, I'll state my case as to why I think QuickBooks is the answer for job costing.

but I hear people say that, you know, you should do all your job costing and your cost of goods sold accounting in the CRM.

I know I've never used ACCU Links.

I know acculinx is better for this function than job nimbus than some of the others.

but even with that being the case, it's still not perfect.

And my argument is someone in our company is doing bookkeeping.

So if we just do the thing we're already doing a little more accurate, which takes no less time.

We now have automatic job costing and we have cleaner books because job costing is not, watching our numbers in business, we can make 60% gross profit on every job we do and still be in the negative because overhead is a big part of making money.

So we can check every job diligently and say we're estimating at 35% and we're making 40%.

We're doing great, but if we're not doing enough volume to cover our overhead, we're not doing great.

We're losing money.

And I've met a lot of guys that think they're doing great in business and have no real metrics to gauge that on other than they know that jobs close profitably, but they think their overhead's 10%.

And then we get in their books and their overhead turns out being 38%.

And they're like, brought to tears because they think they're making money.

they have in the back of their head that the cash in the bank seems like it's not going up at all and they feel like it should be.

So they feel like something's a little off, but they can't put their finger on it because it never sat down to learn QuickBooks.

us as owners don't have to be the QuickBooks doers.

I mean, we can be.

I was in the beginning.

And when we're small, like the 1 to 5 million dollar range, QuickBooks isn't that big of a beast.

Like, I used to do it in like an hour at the end of the day and not even every day of the week.

Like, it's just simple data entry.

It's just learning how to do it.

But when we outsource the books to people who aren't roofers, they're not getting any input from us as far as how to set things up so that we can see the reports and the numbers we need to make decisions.

Because keeping our books is more than just for taxes.

And that's like another common thing I keep seeing.

Everyone thinks we just get bookkeepers and have a QuickBooks account so we can file taxes.

That's not true.

We have QuickBooks and financial so we can review our P and L on a weekly or monthly basis to make decisions in our business.

That's what it tells us.

If our marketing's working, if we can hire people, if our overhead's too high, if we need to raise our prices, maybe we need to introduce higher change orders because we're not Charging enough for extras.

Maybe we need to upsell more.

Like, there's a lot of things that the numbers in our business tell us.

And these numbers aren't in our CRM, they're just not there.

I have no financial reporting in my jobnimbus account.

Literally zero.

I have a revenue number which doesn't tell me anything.

So QuickBooks is what gives us all that.

And when you finally learn where you're at in your business, numbers wise, you actually have a grip on your business.

For example, like, we can't look at the cash in the bank to tell us if we're doing well because we always owe so much in receipt or in payables.

We owe suppliers, we owe our credit cards, and then we're always owed so much money we got to collect money.

So, like, because those two things always fluctuate, the dollar amount in the bank doesn't really tell us much.

I could be in way better shape with 100 grand in my account than with a million in my account.

Because if, with.

When I have 100 grand in my account, if I'm owed a million, and I only owe out 200,000, I'm in way better shape than if I have a million.

I owe out a million and I only owed a hundred thousand.

So we don't even want to look at the cash in the bank, really.

I mean, we got to watch our cash.

But you get my point.

So I'm going to share my screen.

I got this cool little dummy QuickBooks account they set me up with.

Window.

Mackenzie is just that one window Shared.

Yeah.

Profit and loss.

All right, Is that zoomed in enough or is that really hard to see?

It looks pretty good.

I'll zoom in a little just in case.

All right, so this is a landscaping P and L.

But, like, the purpose of this call is not to.

It's not a QuickBooks tutorial.

It's, how do we use QuickBooks in our business to have an accurate picture of where we're at financially and how do we have accurate reports?

So I'm not going to, like, go through every step of bookkeeping.

I'm honestly not the person to go over that stuff.

I mean, I know it.

I used to do it.

It's been like five years since I've been doing data entry in here.

But it's really just like, what do we need to know about QuickBooks, to run our business?

And how do we delegate QuickBooks in a way that we always have clean books?

so the first thing I'M going to start with is the profit and loss statement.

And if we're outsourcing our books, and we've never talked about a chart of accounts or, or like, the structure of our P and L, we're relying on, like, an agency that knows nothing about our business to tell us how we want to look at our numbers on our P and L.

So this is where you'll see things like, I mean, obviously up top, first line of the P and L statement is your revenue, your sales.

And then we all know we have cost of goods sold, which in roofing, we all know what that is, how much in labor will be paying material, what we pay in, punch out, do we have any permit fees, what we pay to dump all the trash, all the direct job costs, costs of goods sold, that comes right under revenue.

And we're left with gross profit.

But whenever I see roofers outsourcing their books, even the categories that they have on their P and L, they don't really tell us much.

So we may see a category called subcontractors expense.

And if I click open that category to see what's in there, I'm probably going to.

I guess I can't click into my dummy account.

If I click into that category called subcontractors expense, I may have gutter guys, roofers, I may have driveway guys to fix broken driveways.

I may have screen repair guys, window repair guys.

I may have painters that we hire.

I may have ciders.

And then me as a business owner, I have to decide, like, does the total number of the subcontractors expense category even tell me anything about my business?

Well, not if every single subcontractor we hire is in that category.

Because when I estimate jobs, I estimate for what my roofing labor is going to be.

So me as the business owner, I don't want all this, extra supplementary subcontractor stuff lumped in, in my roofing subcontractor category.

Because knowing what my percentage of roofing subcontractor expense is based on, based off of revenue would be important.

That's a percentage I would want burned in my head, Whereas maybe the gutters I would want broken out separately.

But nobody's going to tell us that.

And I got to go back because I missed an important point.

When we're looking at the P and L, we never want to look at it without the percentages.

So I just had it up and there was no percentages.

I always want to look at this one, because if every time I look at My P and L.

I have my percentages listed.

I'm going to start to burn them in my head, and I'm going to start to learn my numbers.

I'm going to know that my material expense is exactly 24.2%.

And then if I notice that start to trend up, then I can see that I have a problem.

All of a sudden I'm paying more material.

What happened?

Did we have price increases and I didn't raise my prices?

are my suppliers ripping me off and I need to audit what they're charging me?

Are they raising prices on small items?

And I don't even know about it?

Do I need to shop pricing somewhere else?

Do I need to beat them up a little bit?

Should I be negotiating a rebate?

Like, what's going on?

Because it's always been 24% for the last three years.

Now I'm paying 30% material all of a sudden.

So anytime I view this, I view it with percentages so that I just memorize what these are and I can just, view trends and see what's going on.

but back to outsourcing and the categories not being adequate to tell us things.

The subcontractor expense one's a big one.

a lot of times you'll see just like one materials category.

But then, like, just ask yourself.

I mean, everybody's different.

The level of detail you want in this is going to change depending on how you are.

But, like, I don't want just one cost of goods category called material.

And everything we've ever purchased that's material is in that category.

For example, I don't want, like, my gloves and rags at Home Depot to be mixed in with my shingles from abc.

I would want to call them something different.

I would want to call that like, supplies, miscellaneous supplies.

So it's really easy to decide, like, what we would want to see in here, how we would want it breaking out so that I don't have to click in to all these categories.

I'm in a dummy account now, but the way this works is if you were looking at your P and L on QuickBooks and in the installation, we'll say that was subcontractors expense.

If I click this $250, I would then see all the individual transactions that make up the $250.

I don't want to have to click into those to be able to see where my business is at.

So I just want these dollar amounts and these percentages based on the categories there for to speak to me about the business.

I don't want to have to click into it.

the other big thing we see and this, Taz mentioned this in the call.

When we're outsourcing books, typically they are getting caught up all at one time, which is a problem for us, because if I'm sending invoices every time someone owes me money, I'm adding to my revenue number up top.

But if my ABC bills, for example, aren't being added until 30 days later, my material percentage is going to look way lower than it actually is because my revenue is ahead of my expenses.

So instead of entering the vendor, the ABC bills, the Beacon bills, as they come in.

So.

So that my costs are being added, and I know my expenses are accurate.

And to date, I may look at this P and L and think that I'm making, 60% gross profit, but I don't realize that I've got 200,000 in supplier bills that haven't been entered yet.

But I owe them for it, and I have no idea where I'm at.

another common problem I see is people will invoice 100% of the job amount when they sign a new contract, even though only, say, 10% of a deposit is owed.

So by me invoicing 100% of the job total, I'm inflating my revenue two months before I even start that job, and I've incurred no expenses.

So if my revenue is inflated because, I'm billing early and I'm saying that I'm owed 100% of this contract because I signed it, but really I'm only owed the deposit today, well, then I'm overshooting my revenue.

And if at the same time I'm behind on supplier bills, then I'm really swinging the numbers.

And I've seen, like, as much as a 35% swing on that.

So it's, in my opinion, it's hard to outsource your books and have it all perfect.

I think it's the same as, like, marketing agencies.

I view it very similar.

which we all struggle with marketing agencies because we pay them these big monthly fees and we feel like they're only in our account for two hours a month, and they just don't have the level of detail we need.

And that's because they don't.

And that's because they're not in our business, and they don't care like we do.

And they have plenty of other customers that don't care like us, that don't bother them and just pay the Monthly fee.

But if you have an attention to detail and you want your shit clean, it's just much easier to pay someone to do this stuff in house on a daily basis so that your books are always accurate.

and I promise it's not that complicated.

Like we all know what the P and L looks like.

Even if we don't look at one, we have revenue and then we have what do we have to spend to get this job done.

And then we're left with a certain amount of gross profit after we did all the jobs to then pay for our overhead, which I'll get into now.

The biggest problem I see with the overhead is the advertising.

I've never seen an agency break out the advertising category into subcategories so that we know what we're spending on every channel, which is obviously super important for us.

But an agency is never gonna do that for us.

I mean, we can, we can direct them and if we're paying the ass, we can get them straight through an agency.

But like, it's not that hard to do it ourselves.

So if I have to open up this big advertising category and I have Google, lsa, Google ppc, Facebook ads, mailers, magazines, I have all my marketing stuff mixed in, how am I ever going to determine my ROI on my different sources if I have to open this category up and do a bunch of math on a million line items to figure out what did I actually spend on PPC last month, what I actually spend on Facebook.

but the overhead piece, this is what I'm saying.

A lot of people like if they're making 40% on the jobs, but they have no idea what, what their overhead is.

They really have no idea where they're at in business.

So I, I'm gonna use this to explain this.

This is like a break even chart.

if anyone wants to look at this app, it's called Fathom.

This is what we use for better financial reporting.

So all the numbers are kept in QuickBooks, but we can just link Fathom to our QuickBooks and it just gives us better reports.

Like QuickBooks has nothing like this.

And there's a million examples of charts like this that we look at.

pretty simple setup.

Like you can honestly get it tonight, sync up your QuickBooks and you'll be looking at really cool charts that you've never seen before that can actually speak to you, just like this one about to go through.

But if the numbers in QuickBooks aren't accurate, it's not worth anything.

So like QuickBooks is where the Information's from.

But this is a break even chart.

And like the whole, the whole idea of break even is like I have a certain amount of overhead that I have to cover every month.

And then depending on what my gross profit is, there's a certain amount of revenue I need to make before I break even and cover my overhead.

So like on this chart you could see I've got fixed costs here, 400,000.

And you could see I don't break even until I hit basically a million dollars.

And then everything above that, you see the green line which is my revenue start to break away from my variable costs.

And the further up I get, the further that gap gets, and the more money we make.

So gross profit has nothing to do with it.

So if I only did, where am I at?

If I did a million dollars in revenue at 40% gross profit, I could think I'm doing great in business.

But meanwhile I lost $25,000 because of my overhead because I have no idea what it is and I'm not paying attention.

and a lot of people think this is only a problem for big companies, but it's really not.

it's a problem for small companies.

Like you get a couple hires around you, you have a decent sized marketing budget because you're trying to grow.

You don't understand how that affects the amount of revenue you're going to have to get to cover all that stuff and then start making money.

and I've seen it a lot where like small 1 to 5 million dollar guys have 30 to 40% overhead and they had no idea because they're just trying to grow their business, they're investing with their gut.

they're hiring the field supervisors, they're hiring the office guy, they're paying a marketing agency, they're paying the accounting agency.

And the stuff just adds up.

And because no one's watching it, we have no idea what our break even is.

And we're just doing job costing to gauge our financial health and we're actually in trouble.

it's super, super common.

So QuickBooks is like this is the way to fix all of it.

and I'm on team get an in house bookkeeper because you just have a full time person that's in your office every day doing this stuff on a daily basis.

So like just a quick overview of what that looks like.

There's not that many transactions through our business.

We have credit cards that we track, we have checks that we write that we track, we have vendor bills from ABC that we enter.

I mean, that's.

I mean, that's kind of like the bulk of them.

What, what comes out of the bank, what goes on the credit card, what are we sending out in checks, and what are we collecting?

So all QuickBooks is.

Is tracking all those little transactions and then categorizing them, which I feel like everybody on the call is categorizing their transactions.

Right now.

I gotta move the little window.

so I'll just click into MasterCard.

So say I have my business credit card.

everybody's bookkeepers is already doing this.

So you have a list of transactions made on the credit card.

You open them up and you categorize them.

but what no one's outside bookkeepers are doing is adding a customer to the charges.

So if this was a Home Depot plywood run, and I had someone in my company doing this, we have some way that we track receipts.

Whether it's like a company cam folder, there's a QuickBooks app that does it.

there's all sorts of ways we can track receipts.

And if the standard operating procedure for all my people that have a company credit card is every time you go to Home Depot and swipe to credit card, all you got to do is write the name of the customer on the receipt, and then snap a picture and get it however you want to get it to the person doing bookkeeping.

So now when they come to this Home Depot charge for plywood, they find the receipt.

They go, okay, this receipt.

This is for this job.

I find the customer.

for Billy's Roof, I select the account that was for.

That goes back to the P and L categories that we chose.

And our chart of accounts say it was job materials purchased, I would select it, and that's it.

And all of our bookkeepers are already doing this.

They're just not doing the customer piece, and they're just lazily selecting the category.

They're not counting on us to decide what categories we want things in.

They're deciding for us.

So then our P and L doesn't speak to us, but, like, those couple clicks of a button, and then I hit add.

And like, that's.

That's really it.

I'm in a dummy account, so just bear with me.

so for the credit card transactions, that's it.

And QuickBooks has little things where you can create rules.

So if you have recurring expenses that come in and say, your roof reports, for example, wherever you get those from Eagle View, whoever, you can create a rule in QuickBooks that every time you see an Eagle View transaction, put it in this category.

typically the things that the transactions that are for cost of goods sold, that should be attached to a customer, you can't create a rule because you've got to add the customer.

But a lot of the recurring overhead expenses, you can create rules.

So if you map your Google PPC transactions, they always look exactly the same.

No one really has to do manual entry.

You can create a rule that every time we see this transaction from Google, put it in the Google PPC sub account of the advertising category automatically.

There's all sorts of rules like that.

To minimize the manual entry and then the job costing piece, we just add a customer, however we decide to do that and that's it.

so that's for the credit card.

If I'm gonna enter my ABC bills, which this is another thing I see all the time.

a lot of times the outsourced agencies will not enter bills from our suppliers.

They won't create a bill.

So like every time we buy something from abc they send us a bill and it goes to our email and maybe we send that bill to the agency, they should be creating a bill.

But I see a lot of times they're just waiting for you to pay and then they're bringing that payment in to enter just the bulk payment rather than all the individual bills.

But we should be adding the bills for a couple reasons.

one, it's so we can track what we owe them.

Two, it's so that we're getting things in as soon as they're sent to us.

So if ABC sends us a bill, it's entered like in a day or two so that our expense category is correct.

and then also so that on our balance sheet, which I may get to later, maybe next time, we always have an accurate number for what we owe out to everybody.

So we can always look at the balance sheet and know I got this much in cash, I'm owed this much and I owe out this much.

And if you run a calculation on all those, that's the number we track, not what's in the bank.

And this, it's a super simple process.

And there's actually we're using Makers Hub.

I don't want to get too crazy with that stuff, but there's a tool called Makers Hub that we had to build out.

It was like a pretty in depth build build out for like our use case.

But it's, it's working really well now and it will read our email for invoices.

And then do a lot of this stuff for us.

so if we have the customer PO on the ABC invoice, we have the invoice number, we have the dollar amount.

We obviously know who the vendor is.

A lot of this stuff can now be automated through tools like Makers Hub.

There may be better ones out there, but just something we're using.

Figured I'd touch on.

but if every time I get an ABC bill, I just.

My bookkeeper comes in here.

She selects ABC as my vendor.

She selects the category it's for.

Say it was job materials purchased.

Maybe you wanted to.

Maybe someone wanted to track.

You use ABC and qxo, pretty frequently.

And you just wanted to get an idea what you were spending on.

Both you could have on your P and L.

I think I clicked out of it.

Job materials purchased.

ABC is a subcategory.

And then QXO as another subcategory.

Cause maybe you wanted to know that.

Just thinking of examples, things that you would think of for your business that the, bookkeeper never would.

The outside bookkeeper.

So I'd select ABC as the vendor.

I'd select the category that I just.

That I wanted to put it in.

I'd put the invoice number.

I'd set the terms on the invoice when it's due.

So QuickBooks knows what's current and what's due.

When.

I could put a description, I put the amount.

I select my customer, I hit save.

So just by entering the bills in there like that, QuickBooks always knows what we owe ABC.

And now if I visit my P.

L, that ABC invoice is now listed in my job materials purchase.

So I'm accurate and I'm timely.

obviously you can see it's a super simple process.

So then when it's time to pay your bill, you mark all your open bills paid, you can create a check right from QuickBooks.

That check will wash out everything you owe that you just paid.

And now your balance with ABC will be current.

if I want to pay a sub.

And I don't even.

I just thought of that.

I don't know how.

I don't know how you guys are working.

If you have an outsourced bookkeeper, how you create checks and pay people and then how you send that to them.

But if you're doing everything in house and you're in QuickBooks, you just create a check in QuickBooks.

And same thing.

Who am I paying?

I'm, paying the gutter guy.

I would Find the gutter guy.

What account am I paying it out of?

I would pick it.

What category should that expense paying the gutter guy.

Being on my P and L, I would select it.

If I want to put a description I could.

And then obviously the most important part of all of it, I'm going to select my customer.

So, like, all these functions are already happening in all our businesses.

We're just not giving it the 1% extra level of detail to select customers as we enter them.

But if we do all these things I'm showing you, and then obviously I don't need to go through it.

When we send an invoice, the customer is obviously listed so that we know we build that customer.

Then I can come to reports and QuickBooks whenever I want.

Go to profit and loss by customer.

Where is it?

Profit and loss by customer.

And now I have job costing for every customer we ever worked with.

Not by doing any extra work, not by digging up receipts, not by finding invoices from ABC and the CRM and doing all this extra work to try to do my job costing just by doing bookkeeping 2% better than the people were paying to do it.

I now have P&Ls for every customer we ever worked for.

So now you can implement things like, when you collect the final payment, you pay out those commission checks on Friday.

Whoever cuts those commission checks before we cut them, we print off the P and L report for that customer we're paying.

Maybe we give it to the sales manager, maybe we give that to the production manager, whoever's job it is to ensure that the jobs are profitable before we pay commission.

we just print out the P Ls that are already ready, and review them before we do commission checks.

And like, nobody's having to sit there and crunch numbers to see if we made money on a job.

so for the simplicity and the fact that we're already, everyone's already doing some level of bookkeeping functions in their business.

We just have to do them a little better.

And now we have accurate job costing.

I don't see an argument as to why we would do it in the CRM.

I know people say it, but I just don't see it.

And then getting your, if you're doing your job costing accounting in the CRM, getting it to map perfectly with like all the chart of accounts and getting it to sync over to QuickBooks so that you're not doing double work is like a nightmare.

and I really think, like, only the super, super large companies figure out how to do it correctly.

but I know a lot of, bookkeeping agencies I speak to say that they don't even recommend, setting up the CRM to QuickBooks two way sync because it's just too messy and there's too big of a chance of screwing your books up.

And it just.

They've never been able to make them work.

so I just talked for about 30 minutes.

I'm trying to think if there was anything else I wanted to go through before we could just do questions.

If there is some.

I guess I didn't cover the chart of accounts.

I kind of just skipped over the P and L so I could do that.

it's really simple.

So I'm going to go back to my P and L.

Everyone has like a chart of accounts and a structure to their P and L.

but a lot of us haven't decided how we want it to look.

Maybe you want your commissions to show up, as an overhead expense with your marketing budget, like I do.

Because I like to look at my customer acquisition costs in a nice clean way.

So if I have all my marketing spent plus my sales commission, all in the same category, I have this nice dollar amount of what I spent in marketing and what I had to pay a sales guy to acquire that customer.

That would be my decision.

And I would put, my commissions down in marketing.

But maybe I view it as a job cost, which I wouldn't argue with.

I mean, it is kind of a direct job cost.

It's for a job.

We have to pay a commission on a job.

So maybe I just wanted my commissions up here.

but maybe my P and L right now with my bookkeeper doesn't have a sales commission category on it.

Cause we've just never discussed it.

And they don't put that anywhere specific.

I would just go to my chart of accounts and QuickBooks and we can just add it.

so this is like the existing chart of accounts.

You'll notice here.

Bal that's for balance sheet.

I'm probably not going to get into the balance sheet too much right now.

So all of these accounts live on the balance sheet.

Whereas down here, P L, all of these accounts live on the P L.

And the P L, again, it's income, cost of goods sold, gross profit, expenses, net profit.

So if I wanted to add my commissions, I just hit new account.

I, call it sales commissions.

I select the account type, which for this one, let's just say I want it in cost of goods sold.

I Just find cost of goods sold.

I'll just pick this one for now because that's not important.

The detail type.

I don't even need it.

and then that's it.

And then I just hit save.

And now I have a sales commissions category, so that when I create a check and I select who I'm paying, I could just find sales commission in the category.

Now I'm logging that commission check to sales commission every time, and I'm adding a customer to it.

So I don't think any of this stuff is, like, over complicated.

I think we just.

I think a lot of us just think that QuickBooks is only for taxes.

But, like, really, like, we should be looking at our P and L at least every month just to see how we're doing.

is our overhead trending up?

how's our, you know, payroll expense versus marketing?

Those are our two biggest categories in overhead expenses.

always.

It's just we.

We spend on marketing and we spend on our team.

Outside of the roofing labor.

Those are two expense, categories that I track percentage very closely.

Because if I know for the last couple years, my payroll expense has kind of sat at 5%, but now we slowed down a little bit.

It's trending up to 7, 8, 9.

I know I'm kind of fat with my employees, and I can't really hire someone even if I wanted to.

And then I really have to look around at my team and go, do we have too many people?

Do we have any weak links?

Or do I just need to kind of hang in here, and build up the volume a little bit so I can afford everybody?

And then the opposite.

Like, if it's been at 5% for the last couple years and I notice it's at 3, I know that I've got plenty of room to hire more people because I'm sitting at 3% payroll expense.

We've been a healthy business at 5.

I've got 2%.

If I do 20 million a year, what's, 2% of 20 million?

Well, that's what I have in room for salaries.

And then obviously, the marketing one's super important.

You're gonna spend a lot on marketing.

I hear some people say they spent 2%, some people say 10.

I've always sat between 5 and 7, at least for the past couple years.

so if I'm sitting at my ceiling at 7, I want to grow the business.

I feel a little tight.

Maybe I just need to dive into all my marketing channels and start to reallocate Budget rather than just adding new ones.

Maybe I need to figure out what are my weak links in my marketing spe.

Whereas if I'm at 5%, well, I've got room.

I can spend a little more.

So what would 2% in a month be?

Well, maybe that would be 20 grand.

I got another 20 grand to spend on marketing, and I'll be safe.

so these are, like, the things and the thoughts you have around when you're looking at your books, that you, know, to me, are super important.

So I think that's all I got.

I'm gonna stop sharing screen.

And we could do questions if there are any.

Are we gonna let, like, just let him talk?

Yeah, yeah, it's better.

That's better.

Sick of talking.

Do you want to let Ronaldo.

I'm trying.

Renaldo, mackenzie's trying to let you speak for a question.

how do you track it per job?

Like.

Like, I know you track it for sales rep or per, you know, rental, but how would you do it per job?

Give me, say.

Say a question a little different.

I don't understand 100.

Let's say we do.

If you're reroofing a house, how could I track the job cost for that house versus, you know, a different project?

Yeah, it just.

All of the expenses that went to that house.

So, like, that's the whole piece of it.

It's like, when I.

When I buy the shingles at ABC for that house, I just make sure that I give ABC the po.

They always ask us for the po.

I make sure I choose a PO that whoever's doing my bookkeeping can recognize and say, we spent four grand in shingles for this customer.

And then when I add the bill to QuickBooks, I just add the customer to that transaction to that ABC bill, also by customer.

Okay, customer.

Yeah.

So when I'm creating a check to pay the crew for that roof, for the labor, when I create the check in QuickBooks, I select Accrue.

I'm paying.

I select labor as my category, and then I add the customer to the check.

Actually, in QuickBooks, you know, so you have to, like, that's, like, why I said the receipt example.

Like, if my PMs are always going to, like, Home Depot or lumberyards for miscellaneous things, they have a company credit card.

But they know, like, the rule is every time you use a credit card, you need to take a picture of receipt after you wrote the customer name on it.

Take a picture, get that picture to your bookkeeper.

So then when they see that Home Depot Charge and QuickBooks, and they go to categorize it before they hit submit, they select the customer they see on the receipt.

Okay, you know, I got you two minutes.

Next is Gregory.

Gregory.

I don't think I know him.

What do they.

Do they have to, like, accept that?

Yeah, Gregory, she's, trying to get you to come on for your question.

Okay.

Here.

I'm gonna try Lee, then.

Okay, Lee, are they.

Are the questions in the chat?

Because if they're not going to be responsive, I'll just.

Yeah, they're texted.

What do you got?

Okay, are you using a QuickBooks bank account in order to send checks out through QuickBooks?

Am I using a QuickBooks bank account to send checks out through QuickBooks, we.

We don't.

We don't use QuickBooks checking.

we just have checks that we print from the office.

And, our bank accounts are just set up and synced with QuickBooks so that when we create a check, like, I have check open on my screen now.

Share.

It asks you right here, what account is it going out of?

So I have my bank accounts to select what check, what account that's coming out of, and we just print the check.

you can definitely do it through QuickBooks checking now for sure, but we don't.

The next one is how many bank accounts is everyone using to operate their business?

Do you link all of them to QuickBooks?

How many bank accounts is everybody using to operate their business?

You, guys, could throw that answer in the chat so he can see them.

and then do you link all those accounts to QuickBooks?

If those bank accounts are doing business transactions, and yes, 100%, they should be linked to QuickBooks.

That is it so far.

If anyone has questions.

Cool.

I got no more questions.

What else?

Taz, can you unmute Taz?

He'll speak.

Yeah.

All right.

You know, I got questions.

are you invoicing through Job Nimbus or through QuickBooks to your customers?

I invoiced, metal Apps invoices from Job Nimbus, Fox Haven invoices out of QuickBooks.

Just because, we've been in business longer, and that's just always how we've done it.

so I'm familiar with how, the Job Nimbus payments and invoices come over to QuickBooks.

We don't struggle with that too much.

They.

They land on the balance sheet in an account, and then we have to reconcile them and add them to revenue, and there's, like, a period so we always have, like, payments, to deposit on our balance sheet, which are the payments from Job Nimbus, to QuickBooks for Meta Labs.

Quick John, Nemesis didn't even have invoicing like that when we started.

So, like, we were just always out of QuickBooks.

I don't see the.

The only benefit I would see to invoicing out of Job Nimbus would be like, the converting, like, estimate to material order to invoice, like, is kind of smooth because you're converting straight from your signed estimate.

But then if you're.

You have to be careful because if you're converting the whole approved estimate to an invoice in Job Nimbus and then you're sending that to the customer.

Well, John Nimbus is sending an invoice for the 100%, which is.

That's what I touched on.

Which isn't a problem if you stop it on the balance sheet, and keep it in a liability account and don't count it as revenue.

So you can put it on the balance sheet as a liability because it's money that you're not really owed yet.

And then when the job happens, then you can move it over as revenue.

But if it goes straight from Job Nimbus all the way to the P L and you haven't even started the job and it's 100 of the job, that's a problem.

Yeah.

So there's a couple problems that we've had.

But we do use Job Nimbus for the invoicing to the customers.

but it will, like, group payments and do, like, one disbursement, to us.

And so, and, and then the other side of that is any credit card fees, they take this percentage and we have to, like, do all this math to back that fee out and separate it out.

And the other thing, like you said, if we're creating that full invoice now, we've started splitting them out because what happens is we're going back and these jobs are having income come in.

And so months that were supposed to be closed out so that the CFOs can advise on, we're now going back to and changing when a supplement comes in or when we collect more money or when anything changes on that invoice.

So that was the issue.

But now we're separating it out.

So we're only creating, like, a deposit invoice in Job Nimbus, and then collecting that.

But now we have, like, all these different invoices in there, so that.

That's been one thing, but, we like invoicing through Job Nimbus.

It's just been an issue for the bookkeeping side of things.

Yeah, the, the Job Nimbus payment thing's a pain in the ass.

So like, you have to look at that disbursement and then do all the math so that you can send what was owed from every customer individually.

So, like, we deal with that on the metal app side.

but I do, I do it is convenient to invoice out a Job Nimbus over there.

and luckily we don't have payment schedules.

We just bill for 100 when the job's done over there.

So, like, I don't have all that messy stuff.

Honestly, if I did, I might just chalk invoicing out of Job Nimbus and just do it out of QuickBooks if I had to deal with that.

now are you using QuickBooks Online or the desktop version?

Online.

I've only ever used online.

The old stubborn guys say desktop's way better, but I've just, I've never used it, so I don't have that opinion.

I have no idea.

You know, yeah, we started with somebody who wanted the desktop version and we had to convert to the online.

We're on the online now and it's, it's way better.

so when you're breaking down your expenses, this is where everybody kind of does things a little bit differently and what you include in certain categories.

So like your marketing manager salary, is that landing in payroll or is that landing in your marketing budget?

Yeah, that's all like personal opinion.

Honestly, like, I feel like it.

Like I make changes to my chart of accounts all the time and like, it evolves over the year.

So like, for me it's in payroll expense.

I don't consider that, a marketing expense.

I could, I consider all my ad spend in my marketing, but I could see an argument to put it there because like, you're paying her to do marketing.

So like, that's just opinion stuff.

but ours has gotten so detailed and like fine tuned over the years because like my just care for the reporting has increased.

So like, I'll just always go to Lexi and I'll be like, hey, I don't like the way this category is.

Let's split these off.

Hey, I noticed you're lumping LSA and PPC in the same Google Ads category.

I don't want that.

I want them separated.

You just make decisions because you're the one that, you're the one that looks at the business and wants to know what you want to know.

So it's really just how you want to view things is.

I don't think there's like, a right way.

Like, most people disagree with me that commission should be, as an expense in marketing.

But I don't argue that it's.

It's cost a good soul.

It is what it is.

I just.

That's how I view it, you know?

So for the LSA thing, let's say, you know, you have a customer.

They.

The source was lsa, right?

And then now your job costing a job.

And you know that this customer came from lsa, and we have the data that says what our average cost per lead for LSA is.

Are you putting that as a cost of that customer that's just built within your separated marketing expense that you're applying to everything?

No way.

No way.

I'm not trying to track my marketing cost per customer.

Definitely not.

but what I do do.

So, like, my marketing category is just all of its inexpensive.

but what I do do is look at ROI per lead source as a whole.

So, like, what do we spend on lsa?

How many leads did that get us?

How many appointments did that get us?

Because the lead's not an appointment?

And then what did it get me in sales?

And then I compare gross profit to my marketing spend.

I don't look at revenue to marketing spend.

A lot of agencies try to get you to do that.

That makes no sense.

We got to look at gross profit compared to what we spent, because that actually tells us, like, a hundred thousand dollars in revenue might sound like a lot for $30,000 in PPC spent to an agency.

But if we know we're making 30% profit, we broke even on PPC, and that's not working.

So gross profit versus spent.

So it's like your return on ad spend, correct?

Yeah.

And then you have customer acquisition costs from there.

I look at that as a whole and then by source.

I actually just did a YouTube video on my, like, complete tech stack.

It's like an hour long.

I had 21 tabs open on my computer.

The video is ready.

I have to actually tell my guy to post it.

but that goes into what we use for tracking marketing ROI a little bit.

job Nimbus has.

If you click the.

The marketing tab at the top, they've got the AI voice.

They have marketing roi.

It says in development, coming soon.

And then there's another feature they say that's coming, because right now job Nimbus can't tell you anything about your roi.

They don't know what you spend on marketing.

So they're going to need some way to, you can input or import your marketing spend and then they can kind of look at their sales data to give you numbers.

So we'll see what that looks like.

We use a separate tool for that though, which you'll see in that video.

Gotcha.

And then my last question is like, so I saw like your break even point.

So we do track that as well.

but you have overhead is one thing, but then you have your fixed overhead and your variable.

If we don't sell another job this month, we still have all these salaries that have to be paid.

So that's where like that marketing manager is a fix thing, where the marketing ad spend budget or brand awareness budget, you know, is going to fluctuate and there's certain costs that if we're not building jobs well then our overhead is going to decrease.

Our project manager isn't driving around and doing gas.

and we typically have all that as overhead.

But I saw you were talking about like take a picture of that gas receipt and then put it per that job and actually track it.

Like, like this is a cost of doing this job.

Or I don't know if that was just in that sample there.

or you know, your fixed stuff you could go and renegotiate like the rent or your utility bills or stuff like that.

They're going to be the same every month whether you do 20 million or whether you do, you know, 5 million.

And those are the things you look at when you want to go cut your bottom line when the top line is not able to just be increased or something.

And that's the biggest thing is trying to track the operating expenses versus the overhead expenses and then breaking those down to your fixed versus your variable.

so just things that you got to keep an eye on and watch and see how they are as a percentage of revenue.

I don't think I would ever break my brain on.

Because you called them variable overhead.

I don't think I would ever break my brain on.

Like, yes, I don't spend the exact dollar amount on LSA every month.

But I do have a good idea what my bark marketing budget is like to the dollar every month.

Like we're at about 140 right now and I know that.

So like although they change and they tweak as a percentage every month, it's, it's pretty much where it's at.

I may Make a decision to shoot it up.

If I'm trying to get risky or trying to grow, but like, I don't ever think about, like, well, I've got this overhead here that's a hundred percent fixed.

It's the same exact number every month.

But then these overhead categories, they're not related to jobs, but they can fluctuate a little bit.

But you said they fluctuate with volume.

If something fluctuates with volume, like actual revenue, like the more revenue I do that cost goes up, then I would kind of say that's more of a cost of goods sold.

It sounds like, correct.

But we're not tracking it individually into all those subcategories, like gas or, yeah, I mean project manager payroll.

If there's not a project to manage or we have less projects to manage, well, you know, we can find for them to do to, you know, make up time.

But at some point that may go down or that's another one.

That's what you would have difference of opinion.

So like, there's a lot of people.

And I actually used to do this and I changed it, but we used to actually allocate our PMs to job cost.

And we would put them in cost of goods sold and we would associate their payroll with the job they were at.

So we would have to.

This is why we stopped, because I decided it wasn't that important.

And it could just be an overhead.

But we would look at their week and we would see all the jobs they were at, and then we'd see what we paid them.

And then we would come up with like a per square number and divide it so that we knew like, all right, we paid him fourteen hundred dollars this week.

He was at this many jobs, this much to this customer, this much to this.

And just like as we grew, I'm like, we're doing all this work, it's such a small percentage.

Let's just throw it in payroll.

But like, you could do that.

And the reason I did it was because, yeah, if we're doing less jobs, our project manager payroll goes down.

So it's really cost of goods sold.

It should be up with the jobs, but just like the, the bookkeeping part side of it and the time and the data entry just didn't seem worth it after a while.

So we stopped.

And then on the bulk buy inventory side of things, allocating all of that stuff to individual jobs.

And then we also have a bunch of leftover stuff and we do a ton of repairs and Then we're doing repairs on a leftover ship from another job that is just being allocated over there.

So we use Box Hero for inventory, but allocating all of that stuff that doesn't really have a receipt because it was left over.

I'm curious how you track all that or if you just.

Yeah, so that's interesting.

I didn't bring up inventory on purpose because, like, I know most people.

People don't stock a lot of stuff.

We do, though.

we do.

So, like, the first thing is when you make an inventory purchase, it goes on your balance sheet as an asset.

So, like, you have a category on your balance sheet.

It's not a.

It's not an expense yet, it's an asset.

So, like, I owe ABC the money for it, but it sits on the balance sheet as inventory asset.

And then at the point we send it to a job, we do internal tickets.

So my production manager will, print out a shop material order that needs to go out.

He'll hand it to the warehouse guy.

Warehouse guy will load it, confirm it went out, give it to my billing department.

And now they make a journal entry to pull whatever was to that job out of the inventory on the balance sheet and send it to cost of goods sold on their shop materials, or inventory materials, we call it with a customer.

So, like, we're.

We're basically buying it out of our warehouse.

And then, like, you're going to have to come up with a return system.

you're using a tool for it.

RPMs fill out return tickets on this, arrive at.

We have.

So if they return something, they fill out a ticket, it goes to billing, and they can do the adjustment.

Same thing if someone has to come and pick up a box of nails.

So, like, if you have a warehouse guy that's kind of who's tracking, like, hey, nobody's allowed to take anything out of here unless we fill out our tickets.

Which gets tricky.

I think, like, an old, grumpy warehouse guy's the best.

Someone that people aren't going to walk all over because, like, a lot of people are moving in and out.

but that's a big one because I'll see a lot of smaller guys.

They'll.

They'll buy, maybe they found Dimitri and they know they could save money buying underlayment.

They buy 10 pallets of underlayment to save money, and now it's sitting in their expense.

It should be as an asset because you haven't used it yet, you haven't sold it to a Customer yet, right?

Yeah, I think we're doing.

We're doing a lot of what you just said already.

It's just getting them to follow that system is.

You gotta have that grumpy old man.

yeah, no, it's true.

It's tricky, man.

We're not perfect at it either.

I would never say that.

but it's.

It's worth them.

It's worth the money you save buying a book.

So what is your true overhead percentage as a.

In relation to gross revenue?

ideally 17%.

We had a.

We had a tough summer.

We.

We stayed busy enough.

We stayed busy enough, but, like, we.

Everybody's having a tough.

We started off the year like crazy.

we kind of dropped, like, a little by little.

July, August, September.

We were, like, down, down, down.

And now we're.

We're back to where we were at the beginning of the year.

So we kind of have that season every year, though.

Like, last year looked exactly the same.

I'm in Florida.

We have a lot of people that leave here in the summer because it gets too hot, and then they come back this time of year.

But this year was a little different.

I would say that.

Definitely a little different.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

I shoot.

I shoot for 40 and 17.

That's what I shoot for.

We're not.

We're.

We're below that now, but that's the goal.

Thank you, Andy.

Super.

Appreciate you, brother.

Yeah, man.

What's up, Chris?

He answered my.

You answered my question.

He had it.

How are you.

How are you handling the stuff when you buy it in bulk?

So.

yeah, I tried to.

I tried to take my hand down, but, I mean, no, we're trying to figure out how to do it.

Sorry.

I got my kid getting the car to hear it.

We're trying to figure out how we're in the car with this happening, but we're trying to figure out, you know, if we buy in bulk, how we handle it.

Right.

So have you bought in bulk yet?

What you guys are talking about is what we end up having to do.

No, I'm looking at Dimitri.

we buy.

I buy our ridge vent.

I buy our nails, plywood, all that in bulk.

I get really good deals on those locally, but for the felt and stuff, I'm looking at bm.

hang on.

Sorry, guys.

Apologize.

Been quiet in here the whole time.

but we're looking at buying underlayment and in ice and water, probably in bulk.

And you know, I've got guys that are just kind of pulling the stuff out and I'm trying to get them to write down on the receipts, hey, what else did you use from the shop?

And we're trying to allocate for.

We're job costing in our CRM.

But I'm trying to pull that out and put, put it in QuickBooks as well.

same kind of reason, right?

I just want to look at my, my reports from one place and just know what's going on.

But I did have one more question.

Sorry.

when you're adding these customers in QuickBooks, are they like a drop down that's selectable or are you having to add them manually like at the beginning of the process?

Yeah.

So they That's from Job Nimbus.

You said you use Job Nimbus?

No, we use Jobber.

I was on your Job Nimbus calls because we used to use it and I was thinking about going back to it, but I don't know Jobber at all.

But like we do have like so our Job Nimbus talks to QuickBooks a little bit.

So like we do send our customers from job Nimbus to QuickBooks.

So once they hit a signed contract stage, that customer is always available in the drop down in QuickBooks automatically.

So we're not adding.

I think we could do.

No, I think we can do that.

Yeah.

I've got to see if I can do it without adding their.

I just don't want to send in their financial information.

That's the big.

I don't want invoices or anything like that on there.

So there's a lot of crazy stuff.

There's a lot of crazy stuff you could do with tools like make.com.

there's Zapier out there.

But make.com is way better.

So like anyone want two systems to talk to each other a little nicer than like the pre built integration that they have A lot of times there's ways to achieve it.

If you have a geeky Guy and a make.com account you can figure it out.

That's, that's usually me.

Yeah.

So yeah, we, I've been, I've been playing with it lately.

just seeing what kind of data we can pull out about it.

I mean I appreciate it.

I'm gonna look into that, that sync then with QuickBooks.

See that would be the biggest thing we need to start and then I'm going to use that idea with writing.

Writing the POs or the customer on the receipts.

Company can start using that for job calls.

Cool, man.

Sounds good.

Glad to help.

Thanks, Andy.

my pay.

What is your payroll percentage?

I use my numbers in the example.

It's usually between 5 and 7.

That's kind of where we float.

so we're about 5 and 7 in payroll.

5 and 7 and marketing.

Those are my biggest chunks.

And then the remainder on just all the miscellaneous.

Is that it?

Mackenzie.

All right, cool, guys.

Thank you.