QuickBooks for Painting Contractors: A Complete Guide

As a painting contractor, knowing your income and revenue is key to maintaining a thriving business with a stable cash flow. Otherwise, it’s difficult to tell exactly how your business is performing, the profitability of each project, and to file taxes.

Luckily, a financial accounting platform like QuickBooks offers a reprieve from these challenges.

QuickBooks is an all-in-one accounting platform used by small businesses, including painting contractors, to manage financial processes. Its cost and features make it the go-to platform for small business owners who need help with bookkeeping and financial accounting.

Some of QuickBooks’ key features applicable to painting contractors are:

• A mobile app for managing business operations on the go.

• Integration with Excel and other painting business software applications like ServiceTitan.

• Automatic upload of financial data to cloud servers.

• In-depth financial reports delivered to users’ inboxes at specified intervals.

In this guide, we’ll examine these features, among many others. We’ll also explore the different pricing plans, what each one provides, and how the platform integrates with all-in-one painting software like ServiceTitan.

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What is QuickBooks for Painting Contractors?

QuickBooks is an accounting management platform that helps small business owners track their income, revenue, and expenses and file tax returns.

Which QuickBooks Features Are Important for Painting Companies?

Intuit designed QuickBooks with key features every painting contractor needs for effective financial management, such as:

1. Online invoicing

Create fully customized invoices using templates that customers can settle online. You’ll receive a notification whenever the invoice is viewed and paid, while customers will receive reminders when the payment is due or overdue.

The online invoicing feature allows businesses to accept credit card, ACH, and Venmo payments. The platform automatically records and reconciles these payments with other transactions.

 2. Job costing

For painting contractors, maintaining profitability means avoiding cost overruns while applying a reasonable markup to each project. To do this, they must track job costs as the project progresses, which becomes harder as the project size increases.

QuickBooks helps you track job costs by providing intuitive dashboards displaying expected revenue and project costs in real time. It also has a cost-tracking calculator to confirm whether your project is still on budget and a mega dashboard showing the profitability of all active projects.

3. Automated financial reports

Financial reports highlight what needs to be improved or stopped and the money available for growth. However, creating a usable financial report is a major challenge for small businesses that are usually too cash-strapped to invest in accountants and auditors.

With QuickBooks, you can produce key financial reports—balance sheets, cash flow records, and income statements—which can be emailed directly to your accountant or investor from the platform.

You can track outstanding balances and various invoice statuses—past, overdue, due, and open—via reports such as accounts receivable and customer balance summaries.

4. Time tracking and payroll management

Employees can view their pay details and log their work hours using QuickBooks. This allows you to approve timesheets, monitor job progress, manage time off, track drive time for tax purposes, and see where employees are located throughout the day.

Using the payroll feature, QuickBooks logs all payments made to subcontractors and employees and separates what you pay for labor from monies spent on supplies and equipment rentals. When tax season comes around, the platform uses the saved payment details to create digital 1099-MISC and 1099-NEC forms. 

5. Tax deduction management

QuickBooks stores all receipts you need to file taxes, tracks your mileage, and automatically sorts all expenses, including insurance payments, into their respective tax categories. 

All this helps you avoid the hassle of sorting multiple paper receipts during tax time and helps you cut down your tax bill by claiming all eligible deductions for your painting business.

6. Expense tracking and estimate creation

After connecting your accounts and credit cards to QuickBooks, the platform tracks and sorts all payments into special categories and matches them with vendor invoices. Additionally, it crunches all outstanding invoices, including the amount you owe and the vendor involved, into a single intuitive dashboard to easily track all your expenses and bills.

Furthermore, you can use templates to create estimates and proposals, which customers can sign via email or directly on your mobile device. Once payments are received, QuickBooks processes, categorizes, and deposits them directly into your bank account.

As an accounting platform, QuickBooks provides prudent financial management and bookkeeping. However, every painting contractor knows automation adds efficiency to other business processes, such as job management, customer record keeping, scheduling, and more.

ServiceTitan’s comprehensive software integrates with QuickBooks and automates all key painting business processes. Later, we’ll explain how it works and its various features.

In the meantime, let's look at the cost implications of using QuickBooks.

Which QuickBooks Pricing Plan Is Best for Painters?

QuickBooks offers different pricing plans. The perfect one for your business depends on your budget and business needs. You can try any of the plans for 30 days without paying, then subscribe to the one with the features you need.

Here’s a rundown of QuickBooks’ pricing plans:

• Simple Start: Provides the basic tools a new painting company needs to automate its bookkeeping process. It costs $17.50 per month.

• Essentials: Designed for painting companies that wish to automate accounting processes from end to end. Aside from what’s in the Simple Start plan, Essentials has advanced invoicing features that let you know who owes what and when their payments are due. It also supports three users and sales channels and allows you to add the time employees spend on a project to invoices. It’s priced at $32.50 per month.

• Plus: This plan combines inventory, project, and bill management. Users can integrate with all sales channels, give five people access, track stock levels, and create budgets with team members. It also facilitates tracking projects and their associated costs, such as payroll, overheads, and labor. This plan is priced at $49.50 per month.

• Advanced: This version includes everything in the other plans, plus extra features. The Advanced plan supports 25 users and includes integration with Excel, batch invoice creation, custom access controls that limit what team members can see, and more.

You can try any of the plans for 30 days for free.

Which Version of QuickBooks is Best for Painting Businesses?

QuickBooks offers six versions with the features a painting company needs to operate seamlessly:

• QuickBooks Online: Serves business owners who wish to manage their operations on the go.

• QuickBooks Self-employed: Tailored to painting contractors with no employees.

• QuickBooks Pro Plus: Ideal for businesses that prefer to install the QuickBooks app locally on their desktop computers.

• QuickBooks Premier Plus: Built for business owners and painting contractors who require accounting tools built specifically for their industry.

• QuickBooks Enterprise: Tailored to painting companies with complex inventory, financial accounting, and bookkeeping processes.

• QuickBooks Mac Plus: Perfect for painting contractors who prefer to install the application on their Mac devices.

Each QuickBooks version is designed to meet the needs of a specific group of business owners. Answering these questions will help you determine which QuickBooks version is best for you:

• Do you prefer cloud or on-premises software?

For cloud-based software, all data is automatically uploaded to the internet, making it easier and less costly to maintain. For on-premises software, data is stored locally on a single device or server within the company’s premises, making it expensive to maintain.

QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Self-Employed are both cloud-based, while QuickBooks Pro Plus, QuickBooks Premier Plus, and QuickBooks Enterprise are locally installed.

• Small or large business?

QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Self-employed, and QuickBooks Pro Plus are designed with just the right features and functionalities a small business needs.

Conversely, QuickBooks Premier Plus, QuickBooks Enterprise, and the QuickBooks Online Advanced packages are tailored to large painting contractors with multiple employees and complex processes.

• How many users do you wish to give access to?

Each QuickBooks version allows a specific number of administrative users, with Enterprise supporting the largest number (40 users). Go through the versions on QuickBooks’ website to decide which one accommodates the number of people you want to access your accounting and bookkeeping records.

• What’s your knowledge of accounting processes?

QuickBooks Pro Plus, Premier Plus, Enterprise, and Desktop are built specifically for business owners with medium to advanced knowledge of accounting processes. If you have little or no accounting knowledge, you should choose QuickBooks Online or Self-employed.

• Do you use Windows or Mac devices?

If you wish to work from a Mac device, subscribe to Mac Plus. Other versions work best on Windows devices.

Can QuickBooks Be Integrated with Painter Contractor Software?

Yes, QuickBooks can be integrated with painter contractor software.

Painting contractors integrate QuickBooks with their contractor software to better view their financial state and daily transactions without copying, pasting, or entering data manually.

For example, ServiceTitan’s integration with QuickBooks automatically captures and records all field customer purchases. This saves time by eliminating the need for technicians to return to the office with many paper documents that office personnel must manually record.

The integration allows field techs and back-office staff to create invoices and purchase orders and send them directly to QuickBooks. This ensures all records are kept securely and helps you go paperless.

We also have a robust accounting platform that helps painting contractors track payables, receivables, and employee salaries (including their performance pay).

The platform helps painting contractors follow up on sales opportunities by showing all open invoices in a single menu and connecting with customers via an intuitive CRM. Users can also close or open accounting periods and control who has access to make changes, ensuring all records are accurate.

Streamline Your Business Processes with ServiceTitan

Automating financial accounting and bookkeeping processes is just one aspect of running an efficient painting company. That’s why we designed ServiceTitan to be a comprehensive painting contractor software platform with every tool required to operate seamlessly.

Our platform allows you to run marketing campaigns, schedule jobs, monitor employee performance, communicate with customers, and generate multiple reviews.

Book a free call to get a personalized walkthrough of how ServiceTitan can help you manage your accounting processes. 

ServiceTitan is a cloud-based, all-in-one home service business management solution built specifically to help companies streamline their operations, track finances, and fuel revenue growth. Our comprehensive, cloud-based platform is used by thousands of electrical, HVAC, plumbing, garage door, roofing, and painting companies nationwide—and they have increased their revenue by an average of 25 percent in just their first year with us.