Construction Accounting

by Lor
(BC)

My husband works for himself in construction. I do his bookkeeping, he works alone.

I am wondering about billing customers when there are materials that need to be charged to them on the invoice. How do I record it?

When we purchase the materials on the credit card, I enter it as an expense. But when I bill the customer, it is not income, what would it be? I use Simply Accounting.

THANK YOU SO MUCH!

Hi Lor,

I use QuickBooks, so I'm not sure how it works in Sage / Simply Accounting, but it is probably similar.

In QuickBooks, when you have an expense that you want to be reimbursed for, there is a field to enter the customer name associated with expense (allows you to do job costing) and a separate column to put a check mark in to say it is reimbursable.

When you invoice the customer, you click on the reimbursable expenses button to bring up the expenses and you select what you want to include in the invoice.

A few things to remember:

1. Reimbursable expenses are to be recorded to income, not offset against your expenses. Name your revenue account something like "Reimbursed Expense Revenue".

2. If you are a GST/HST registrant, reimbursed expense revenue is taxable. You can decide if you are going to pass on the expense at cost or with a markup. It will depend what is written in your contract. QuickBooks has a feature that allows you to markup the expenses if desired.

3. If you live in B.C. real property contractors no longer charge your customer PST on the materials unless there is a pre signed and prewritten agreement that meets strict criteria. The contractor must absorb the PST expense if the criteria is not met. This is a new rule with the reimplementation of PST in B.C.

Hope this helps.




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