The job-costing, P&L, supplements, software, and money-mechanics writing your generalist bookkeeper isn’t doing. Built for restoration owners and the finance people behind them.
Short on time? Start here — the one breakdown most worth your next ten minutes.
The definitive bookkeeping guide for restoration companies — covering chart of accounts, job costing, insurance receivables, supplement tracking, TPA fee handling, equipment revenue, and the monthly close process specific to water, fire, mold, and rebuild operations.
Six tracks, one question each. Pick the problem you’re trying to solve right now — each tile says what you’ll walk away knowing.
Find out if your margins are actually good — and the specific levers that move net profit, not just revenue.
Your busiest month is your most dangerous month. Costs scale with volume now, but insurance AR lands 60–90 days later — here's the exact mechanics of the gap and how to see it coming.
A restoration company's dominant profit problem changes at every revenue stage — owner-as-production at startup, blended-margin blindness at $500K–$1.5M, overhead outrunning gross profit at $1.5M–$3M, owner-as-bottleneck at $3M–$5M, and unit-economics drift above $5M. This is The Restoration Profitability Roadmap: the problem and the opportunity at each stage from $0 to $10M+.
Most restoration companies leave 8–12% on the table from a stale Xactimate price list alone — before counting unrecovered deductibles, unbilled code upgrades, and missing emergency-response premiums. This is The Restoration Pricing Audit Framework: a 7-point audit you can run on your own books in 90 minutes to find the money hiding in your pricing.
Stop guessing which jobs make money. The job costing and step-by-step procedures that plug the leaks.
Step-by-step SOP for tracking, deploying, recovering, and reconciling restoration drying equipment — 22 steps across 8 phases that stop equipment losses and billing leaks.
Step-by-step SOP for daily crew dispatch and on-call rotation in a restoration company — 22 steps across morning huddle, assignment logic, after-hours intake, and burnout prevention.
Step-by-step SOP for fire and smoke loss work — a 24-step procedure covering scene assessment, smoke-type categorization, pack-out, structural soot removal, and deodorization.
The bet-the-business calls — who to hire, what to outsource, which bookkeeper — made with numbers, not gut.
It starts with practicality and ends with a problem that's hard to see because it grew slowly. The office manager–bookkeeper arrangement works fine at $500K. By $1.5M–$2M it's costing you real money — in errors, missed supplements, and financial blind spots. Here's what to watch for.
A fractional CFO isn't a luxury title or a vague 'strategic advisor.' For a $3M–$7M restoration company, it's four specific deliverables: a 13-week cash forecast, WIP reporting, bank covenant prep, and sale preparation. Here's what each one costs and what each one returns.
Most restoration owners can't tell a specialist from a generalist in an interview. These five questions change that — each one has a wrong answer that's easy to give, and a right answer that only someone with actual restoration bookkeeping experience would know.
Which tools actually fit restoration accounting, and which will cost you a year — decided before you commit.
Your estimating platform choice does affect your bookkeeping workflow — but probably less than you think. The core accounting steps are the same regardless of platform. The differences are in export quality, supplement tracking, and the amount of manual mapping work your bookkeeper has to do.
A categorized guide to every major app category a restoration company needs around QuickBooks Online — job management, documentation, time tracking, payroll, AP, and expense management. What integrates, what doesn't, and what works at each revenue stage.
PSA by Canam is one of the few platforms built to handle the insurance payment cycle natively. It's also complex, expensive, and right-sized for $7M+ multi-location operations. Below that threshold, a properly configured QBO setup with a specialist almost always wins the total cost and capability comparison.
The deep guides, industry data, and exit math that tell you where the business is headed and what it's worth.
How to sell a restoration company — industry M&A landscape, SDE vs. EBITDA valuation, acquisition multiples by company size, what moves the multiple, 24-month prep checklist, Quality of Earnings, deal structures, and tax implications for restoration company owners.
How to manage the finances of a restoration business — P&L structure, WIP schedules, 13-week cash flow forecasting, working capital math, KPIs by revenue stage, banking relationships, tax planning, owner compensation, and the Restoration Financial Maturity Model.
How to account for insurance receivables in restoration — covering the full billing lifecycle, ACV vs. RCV vs. holdback accounting, supplement tracking, two-party checks, TPA fee treatment, AR aging by job stage, revenue recognition timing, and the Insurance AR Lifecycle framework.
Plain-English definitions for every insurance, accounting, and tax term an adjuster or buyer will use on you.
Canonical definitions for every tax and legal term a restoration business owner encounters — from entity types and depreciation elections to lien laws, payroll tax, workers' comp classification, and surety bonds.
Complete reference guide to every major certification and standard in the restoration industry — IICRC certifications (WRT, ASD, AMRT, FSRT, CCT, OCT, and more), RIA designations, industry standards (S500, S520, S540, S700), and regulatory requirements (EPA RRP, OSHA). Each entry is a citable definition.
Canonical definitions for every major software tool in the restoration industry — what category each tool is in, what it does, what it doesn't do, typical pricing, who it's right for, and how it integrates with QuickBooks Online. 30+ tools defined.
The handful of pieces that change how an owner reads their own numbers — plus the exact sequence we run to clean up a set of books.
The exact diagnostic-to-remediation sequence we run on every new engagement. Read it as a guide to fix your own books — or use it as the brief for the bookkeeper already in your seat.
How the major platforms score on the only four things we care about as bookkeepers: clean cost-code export, supplement workflow, equipment-day handling, and books reconciliation. Updated Q2 2026.
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