Bookkeeping for electricians, plumbers and other trades, done every working day.

Why trades bookkeeping slips behind

An electrician, plumber or joiner buys something almost every day. Each purchase comes with a receipt that ends up in the van door, a jacket pocket or a photo on your phone.

Customers pay by bank transfer, card or cash, sometimes in stages. Main contractors pay after taking a CIS deduction. If nobody records this as it happens, receipts go missing and costs are left out. We record it day by day, so nothing piles up.

Materials receipts and merchant accounts

Materials are usually the biggest cost for a trades business. They come in two forms, and we handle both.

• Counter and card purchases. You snap a photo of the receipt or forward the email. We match it to the card payment on your bank feed and post it with the right cost category and VAT.
• Trade accounts. Merchants and wholesalers often send invoices for each collection and a monthly statement. We record each invoice, match your payments against them and check the balance against the statement, so you can see what you owe.

Where a purchase has no receipt, we list it and ask you about it.

If you tell us which job a purchase relates to, we can tag it using your software's job or project tracking, so you can check whether a job made money.

Van and vehicle costs

The van is the other big running cost. Fuel, insurance, servicing, repairs, tyres, road tax, parking and finance payments all go through the books. We record each one against the vehicle and keep finance agreements straight, so the interest and the repayments are not mixed up.

Sole traders can choose simplified expenses for a vehicle instead of claiming actual running costs. For the 2026/27 tax year, the flat rate for cars and goods vehicles is 55p a mile for the first 10,000 business miles and 25p a mile after that. You cannot use simplified expenses for a vehicle you have already claimed capital allowances on, and limited companies cannot use simplified expenses at all.

Which method suits you is a decision for you or your accountant. Once it is agreed, we record your van costs the same way every month.

CIS and the construction reverse charge

If you do construction work under the Construction Industry Scheme, or your sales fall under the VAT domestic reverse charge for building and construction services, the books need extra care: sales recorded at the full amount invoiced, CIS deductions tracked against your contractors' statements, and reverse charge sales kept on their own VAT code. We cover that work on our page on construction and CIS bookkeeping. For VAT generally, a business must register if its taxable turnover for the last 12 months goes over £90,000, or is expected to go over £90,000 in the next 30 days. We post each sale to the right VAT code so your VAT return is built from correct records.

Customer payments, deposits and stage payments

Trades jobs are often paid in parts: a deposit, stage payments and a final balance. We match each payment to the right invoice, so you can see which customers still owe you and how much.

Cash payments are recorded too. If cash is used to buy materials before it reaches the bank, we need to know, so the difference is explained rather than left as a gap.

What is included, and what is quoted separately

Every package covers the same daily work: bookkeeping every UK working day in your existing software, bank reconciliation and receipt matching, finance inbox monitoring, missing invoices and receipts followed up, and a monthly financial summary in plain English.

We work in Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, FreeAgent, Dext, VT Transaction+ and others. If your records are behind, we can bring them up to date first with catch-up bookkeeping.

Some work sits outside the monthly packages and is quoted separately: catch-up work on older records, tax returns, payroll, CIS returns and statutory filings. Sole traders should keep records for at least 5 years after the 31 January submission deadline of the tax year they relate to. Our guide on how long to keep business records has more detail.