Whether you bill in hours, by the job, or on retainer — we build the books to match the way your business actually works. For law firms, engineering firms, agencies, HVAC contractors, plumbers, electricians, and every other service business too big for a bookkeeper but not yet ready for an in-house controller.
Law firms, accounting firms, engineering firms, architects, consultants, and agencies — businesses that bill in hours, fixed fees, or retainers, where the work product is intellectual rather than physical, and where revenue recognition is more complicated than it looks.
HVAC, plumbing, electrical, pest control, landscaping, roofing, cleaning, and pool services — businesses dispatching technicians to jobs, running fleet operations, tracking parts inventory, and managing recurring service contracts. The accounting needs are different, and most bookkeepers don't know them.
You know your total gross margin. You don't know whether the Memorial Day install made money or lost it. Without real job costing, you're subsidizing bad jobs with good ones and you can't see it.
The integration worked once. Now there are duplicate invoices, parts inventory keeps drifting out of sync, and your dispatcher fights your bookkeeper every Monday morning.
Your agency or consultancy gets retainers monthly, but your books show them as revenue when received. Your P&L lies about how much you've actually earned, and your CPA flags it every spring.
Professional services businesses share a common accounting challenge: the work product isn't a physical thing you can count. It's hours, expertise, deliverables, and outcomes. That makes revenue recognition, project profitability, and partner compensation more complicated than they look — and most general bookkeepers handle them badly.
Here's how the accounting needs to actually work in each professional services sub-segment we serve.
Texas law firms have one accounting concern that towers over all others: trust accounting. The Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct require lawyers to maintain client funds in separate IOLTA accounts, never commingled with operating funds, with documentation that ties to the penny for every client.
Every month, three balances must match exactly: (1) the bank statement balance, (2) the firm's general ledger balance, and (3) the sum of all individual client ledger balances. If they don't tie, you have a problem the State Bar takes very seriously. Most general bookkeepers don't even know what a three-way reconciliation is.
Beyond trust accounting, law firm books also need to handle:
It's the worst-kept secret in our industry: accounting firms are often the worst at their own internal bookkeeping. Partners are busy serving clients, the office manager has been "handling" the books for years, and nobody's getting around to fixing it. We work with accounting firms — especially small-to-mid-sized CPA practices — who want their own internal financial house in order without one of the partners having to spend a Saturday doing it.
Engagement work, fixed-fee billing, payroll for staff accountants, partner draws, and client deposit tracking — all standard parts of what we handle.
Project-based professional services need real WIP (work-in-process) tracking — accumulating costs and progress against fixed-fee projects, applying earned revenue based on percentage of completion, and producing project profitability reports that tell partners which projects are running over budget before the budget is blown.
We build WIP schedules, work-in-progress accounting that integrates with project management tools (Deltek, BQE Core, Mango Practice), and produce the partner-level project profitability dashboards engineering and architectural firms need to decide which projects to take and which to pass on.
The dominant accounting issue for agencies and consultancies is deferred revenue. When a client pays a $50,000 retainer covering six months of work, your books should not show $50,000 of revenue in the month you received the check. They should show the retainer as a liability, then recognize $8,333 of revenue each month as the work is performed.
Beyond retainers, agencies and consultancies also need clean handling of:
Home service businesses share a particular kind of growing pain. You start small — one truck, husband-and-wife operation, the spouse does the books on QuickBooks. Then you grow. Three trucks, six technicians. Then ten. Then twenty. Somewhere along the way the bookkeeping stops keeping up — the software is patched together, the technicians' labor isn't allocating to jobs correctly, parts inventory is a guess, and you can't tell which service categories are actually making money.
Most general bookkeepers can't fix this. They've never run a field service management platform, they don't understand multi-truck operations, and they treat your business like it's a retail shop. We've worked with enough HVAC, plumbing, and electrical companies to know exactly where the books typically break.
If you're running a home service business above about $1 million in revenue, you're probably on one of these platforms: ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber, FieldEdge, ServiceFusion, or RazorSync. They handle dispatch, scheduling, technician routing, customer communication, invoicing, and payment collection. They also integrate with QuickBooks — supposedly.
In practice, those integrations break in predictable ways:
Before we start managing the books month-to-month, we verify the integration is set up correctly. About 70% of the time, we end up rebuilding part of it. That's a one-time project cost (usually $2,500–$6,000) but it's the difference between accounting that's accurate and accounting that's a guess.
Most home service business owners can tell you their total revenue and their gross margin. Very few can tell you which job types make them money. Drain cleaning vs. water heater installs vs. service contracts vs. emergency calls — each has wildly different margin profiles, but most owners only see the blended number.
Real job costing changes that. We set up your accounting system so that every job tracks its own:
The output: a monthly job profitability report that tells you which service categories are actually profitable, which technicians produce the most margin (not just revenue), and which customers cost more to serve than they pay you.
Home service payroll gets complicated fast. Hourly technicians, salaried lead techs, commission-based comfort advisors, spiff bonuses on specific equipment sales, tips, and 1099 subcontractors all show up on the same payroll register. Each has different tax treatment. The FICA tip credit applies in some scenarios. The cash payment of subcontractors creates 1099 obligations most companies handle badly.
We run home service payroll cleanly — Gusto, ADP, Paychex, or whatever you're on — and we handle the year-end 1099 process, the FICA tip credit if it applies to your business, and the truck-allocation accounting that determines what's a deductible business expense vs. employee compensation.
HVAC maintenance plans. Pest control quarterly contracts. Pool service agreements. These are deferred revenue — customers pay annually (or quarterly) but you provide service over time. The accounting needs to recognize revenue as service is delivered, not when payment is received.
Done correctly, this creates predictable monthly recurring revenue (MRR) reporting that lets you actually value the recurring portion of your business — which matters enormously if you ever sell. Companies with cleanly-tracked, recurring-revenue maintenance bases typically sell at higher multiples than companies with messy "we have customers" books. Done wrong, your books tell the wrong story and you give up value at sale.
30-minute discovery call. We'll ask about your business, your software stack, where the books are working, and where they're not. You'll walk away with a clear sense of what's possible and what it would cost.
Book a Discovery Call →Whether you're a law firm with $4M in annual revenue or an HVAC company running fifteen trucks, every Anchor Point engagement includes the same monthly foundation — plus the industry-specific deliverables your business actually needs.
Direct revenue, fully-burdened cost, and contribution margin for every job, project, or service category. Tells you which work makes money and which doesn't.
P&L, balance sheet, cash flow statement, and a plain-English narrative — delivered by the 15th of the following month, every month, without you asking.
For law firms — bank balance, GL balance, and client-ledger sum reconciled monthly. Audit-ready documentation maintained for State Bar review.
For agencies, engineers, and architects — work-in-process tracking, project completion percentages, and properly recognized retainer revenue.
For trades — monthly verification that ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, or your platform of choice is syncing correctly with QuickBooks. Issues caught before they become 6-month-old problems.
Hourly, salaried, commission, spiff, tip, and 1099 — all run cleanly, all reconciled monthly, all year-end-ready by December 15th.
Monthly or quarterly sales tax filings, properly categorized between service revenue and parts/products, and annual Texas franchise tax handled.
Quarterly or monthly conversations about what the numbers are telling you, what to do about it, and where the business is heading. Included in every engagement.
If you're a service business between $1M and $10M in revenue, here are the signals that your current bookkeeping has hit its ceiling. Most owners we work with had at least three of these going on when they called us.
None of these signals individually means you need to switch accounting providers. Three or more usually means you should at least have a conversation.
Yes. Home and field service businesses — HVAC, plumbing, electrical, pest control, landscaping, roofing, cleaning services, pool services — are one of our most active client segments. We're familiar with the major field service management platforms (ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber, FieldEdge, ServiceFusion) and we know how to make their QuickBooks integrations actually work, including the parts that usually break.
Texas IOLTA and trust accounting has specific requirements — separate trust bank accounts, three-way reconciliations every month (bank balance, book balance, client ledger), zero commingling of operating and trust funds, and detailed per-matter tracking. We're built for this. Our law firm engagements include monthly three-way trust reconciliations, IOLTA compliance documentation, and the records the State Bar of Texas will ask for if they audit your trust account.
Job costing is the practice of tracking revenue and direct costs (labor, materials, subcontractors, equipment) for each individual job or project. Without job costing, you only know your total gross margin — you don't know which jobs make money and which lose money. For home service businesses dispatching technicians and for project-based professional services, job costing is the single most valuable accounting practice you can implement. Most businesses without job costing are subsidizing unprofitable work with profitable work and don't realize it.
Yes. Both platforms have QuickBooks integrations that work — when they're set up correctly. We've seen and fixed dozens of broken setups: duplicate revenue postings, missing technician labor allocations, parts inventory falling out of sync, sales tax mis-categorization. Our standard onboarding for ServiceTitan and Housecall Pro clients includes verifying or rebuilding the integration so the data flows cleanly between your field operations and your accounting.
Retainer revenue has to be tracked as deferred revenue (liability) until earned, then recognized as revenue over the service period. Most bookkeepers post retainers as revenue when received, which is wrong and creates significant tax and reporting problems. We handle deferred revenue correctly, produce clean monthly recognition schedules, and give your books a defensible, GAAP-aligned revenue profile that holds up for lender reporting, agency valuations, and eventual sale.
Recurring service contracts are deferred revenue — collected up front but earned over time. We track them as a liability when payment is received, then recognize revenue monthly as service is delivered. This produces clean monthly recurring revenue (MRR) reporting that significantly increases your business's value at sale. Companies with properly-tracked recurring revenue bases typically sell at 30-50% higher multiples than companies with messy books.
Monthly engagements at Anchor Point start at $3,000 and most service business clients land between $5,000 and $7,000 depending on size, transaction volume, number of technicians or professionals, and how much CFO-level guidance is needed. We don't bill hourly. Pricing is fixed and quoted up front based on a clear scope. Project work (catch-up bookkeeping, software integration rebuilds, loan-ready financials) is priced separately.
30 minutes. Bring your last three months of financials, your service software credentials, and a list of what's frustrating you. We'll listen, ask the questions that matter, and tell you straight whether we're the right team to take it over.