The $180,000 tenant finish that made $9,000
Say a Dallas electrical shop — the kind that calls us looking for electrician accounting services Dallas contractors can actually use — lands a $180,000 tenant finish in Deep Ellum. Three journeymen, two apprentices, four months. Material buyout hit $62,000, labor ran $84,000 loaded, and the shop billed every draw on time.
Owner figured $30,000 of profit. Final numbers said $9,000.
Nobody stole anything. Two change orders — a panel upgrade and 14 added circuits — got performed on a verbal from the super and never made it onto an invoice. Wire pulled from the shop's own stock never got charged to the job. And the truck, the shop rent, and the estimator's salary were never allocated to anything, so every job looked fat until the year closed and it didn't.
That's the actual reason contractors go searching for electrician accounting services in Dallas. Not compliance. Money that disappeared.
What "electrician accounting services in Dallas" means at this firm — and what it doesn't
"Accounting" is what people type into Google. It's a wide word, so here's the narrow version.
Stream does four things for electrical contractors:
Bookkeeping. Bank and credit card reconciliation, material invoices coded to the right job, payroll and AP/AR reconciled into the books so what's on the balance sheet matches what's in the bank. You run payroll and buy your own material. We make sure it lands correctly.
Job costing. Every hour and every foot of MC cable tied to a job and a cost code. Labor, material, sub, equipment, other. That's how you find out the Deep Ellum job lost money in month two instead of month five.
WIP tracking. Cost-to-date against contract value, so you know what you've earned versus what you've billed. If you carry any commercial work with retainage, this is the report your bonding agent and your banker actually read.
Tax preparation. Filing the return — Form 1120, Form 1065, or Form 1040 with a Schedule C, depending on how you're set up. Extensions on Form 7004 when the books need more runway.
Here's what we don't do, because you should know before you call anybody. No tax planning. No payroll processing. No audits, reviews, or compilations, and no financial statement attestation — Stream is not a licensed CPA firm. No sales tax filings, and no one here running your AP or chasing your receivables for you.
You're buying clean books and a return you can defend. Not a person on retainer to call about every decision.
The three places electrical shops leak money
Change orders performed on a verbal. Electrical is the trade this hurts most, because the scope changes constantly and the super is standing right there. Rule we push: nothing gets performed without a written CO number, and the CO number gets a line in the job cost file the same day. A shop doing $2 million a year that loses two $4,000 change orders per quarter is throwing away $32,000 annually — and that's straight profit, since the labor was already paid.
Shop stock that never gets charged out. You buy 5,000 feet of #12 THHN on a bulk order and pull from it across six jobs. If none of it gets allocated, every one of those six jobs shows a phantom margin and your inventory line quietly rots. Fix is a material requisition per job, even a photo of a handwritten slip. Ugly works. Nothing doesn't.
Overhead nobody allocates. Service trucks, the yard, the phone system, the estimator. Suppose your annual overhead is $240,000 and you run $1.6 million of direct job cost. That's 15 cents of overhead on every direct-cost dollar. Apply it, or your bid margins are fiction.
Same three leaks show up in plumbing, HVAC, roofing, concrete, and remodeling shops. Electrical just runs more change orders per job than most.
The 1099 problem that's about to get bigger
If you pay 1099 helpers, low-voltage subs, or a data guy who comes in for the drops, the reporting threshold for Form 1099-NEC rises to $2,000 for tax year 2026 (tax years beginning after 2025). Payee statements and the IRS filing are both due January 31 for tax year 2026.
The trap isn't the threshold. It's that most shops don't know who they paid until January, because subs get coded to "contract labor" as one lump and the W-9s were never collected. Collect the W-9 before the first check clears. That single habit turns January from a fire drill into a print job.
And if your books are behind, an extension buys time on the return — the extended individual return due date is October 15, 2026 for tax year 2026 — but it doesn't buy you a picture of which jobs made money. That answer only comes from job costing.
How to tell your current setup isn't working
Four questions. If you can't answer all four inside ten minutes, the setup is broken:
- What's your gross margin on the last three completed jobs — by job, not blended?
- How much retainage is outstanding right now, and on which contracts?
- Are you overbilled or underbilled across open work?
- Which cost code blew the estimate on your worst job this year?
Most shops that come to us can answer one. Usually the first, and usually wrong, because overhead was never allocated.
If the books are months behind before any of that's possible, the honest first step is catch-up and cleanup bookkeeping — you can't job-cost a year that was never reconciled.
What this costs
Pricing depends on transaction volume, how many jobs you run at once, and whether the prior year needs cleaning first. A one-truck service shop and a 12-electrician commercial outfit with three open WIP contracts are not the same job.
Submit a pricing request at app.streamtaxes.com/get-pricing. Tell us your annual revenue, roughly how many open jobs you carry, and whether you're current or behind, and you'll get a real number for bookkeeping, job costing, WIP, and tax prep.
If you'd rather read first, the electrical contractor bookkeeping and tax page lays out the monthly deliverables line by line.
