How do I track profitability by building maintenance contract in NYC?
The simplest way to do this in QuickBooks Online is to treat each contract as its own project or sub-customer. Every building you service gets its own record. When you enter expenses or payroll costs related to that building, you tag them to that project. This gives you a profit and loss by contract without building anything complicated.
Direct costs are what you allocate. That means the labor hours your crew spends at each building and the materials or supplies used on site. If a crew member works three buildings per week, their wages get split across those three projects based on actual hours. Cleaning supplies, replacement parts, equipment rentals, and any subcontractor costs tied to a specific building all go to that project too.
Shared overhead does not get allocated to individual contracts. Your office rent, insurance, vehicle costs that serve multiple buildings, and administrative payroll stay at the company level. Trying to spread these across every contract creates messy numbers that shift every month depending on how you divide them. Keep it simple. Your per-contract reports should show revenue minus direct costs to give you gross margin. That gross margin has to be high enough across all your contracts to cover your overhead and still leave profit.
Run a Profit and Loss by Customer report in QBO monthly. This shows you revenue and direct costs for each building side by side. A contract generating $4,000 per month with $3,800 in direct costs is a 5% margin, and that building is barely covering its own costs before overhead. A contract at $4,000 with $2,400 in direct costs is a 40% margin and is carrying its weight. You need to see these numbers to know the difference.
This matters most at renewal time. Facility service companies in NYC often renew contracts year after year without evaluating whether the pricing still works. Labor costs go up, supply costs go up, but the contract price stays flat. Without per-contract gross margin data, you’re guessing about which contracts to renegotiate and which ones are fine.
The setup takes some effort up front. Your chart of accounts needs cost categories that separate direct labor from overhead labor, and direct materials from general supplies. If your QBO file is already a mess of uncategorized transactions, the reporting won’t mean anything until the books are cleaned up and structured correctly.
If you run a building maintenance operation across the Bronx or NYC and want to get this kind of visibility into your numbers, small business bookkeeping in the Bronx from someone who understands contract-based accounting makes a real difference. The goal is a system where you can pull up any contract and know within a few clicks whether it is making or losing money.
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