YOUR BOOKS
ARE A
CATEGORY
3 LOSS.
And you’re running your business like nothing’s wrong.
A Category 3 water loss is total contamination — the worst of the worst. When your books are in that condition, every decision you make is based on bad data. You think you’re profitable. You think that job went well. You think cash will be fine next month. You’re guessing. And in restoration, guessing eventually closes the doors.
This is a Category 3 financial situation. Not because you’re doing anything wrong — but because nobody built your books for a restoration company. We fix that.
Restoration companies don’t close because of a lack of work.
They close because of cashflow. Because they had a great revenue year and still couldn’t make payroll in March. Because they took on more jobs than ever and somehow had less money. Because they were growing fast — and growing broke.
The work is there. The insurance claims keep coming. The crews stay busy. But the money — the actual money — doesn’t behave the way it should. Because the financial picture in your books doesn’t match the financial reality of your business.
Restoration bookkeeping isn’t regular bookkeeping with a few extra steps. It’s a completely different discipline. Insurance-driven revenue, 60–90 day AR cycles, TPA billing programs, supplement negotiations, equipment-as-revenue — none of this maps to a standard QuickBooks setup. And when it’s set up wrong, every decision you make about hiring, equipment, capacity, and growth is built on a foundation of sand.
“Running your business without accurate job costing is like driving at night with no headlights. You might stay on the road for a while. But eventually you won’t see what’s coming.”
You don't know which jobs made money
You finished a $220K water and rebuild job last month. Did you make money on it? You genuinely don’t know. Your books show revenue. They don’t show margin. Without job costing, every estimate you write for the next job is a guess.
Supplements evaporate between Xactimate and QuickBooks
The adjuster approved an extra $18K. Your crew did the work. But somewhere between the estimate platform and your books, the revenue disappeared. It happens on nearly every job. It adds up to tens of thousands a year.
TPA programs are eating your margin invisibly
Contractor Connection sends you leads. They also keep 10–18% of every job. If that’s not coded as a separate cost line, your P&L thinks you have better margins than you do. You’re making pricing decisions on the wrong numbers.
Your equipment is a daily revenue line nobody's tracking
Every air mover, every dehumidifier — billed daily per the Xactimate price list. Most restoration companies bill it once and walk away. Equipment revenue is the most consistently under-billed line in the industry.
Your CPA tells you the year was fine. You're not sure they're right.
Tax returns get filed. Numbers look okay. But you can’t explain why it felt tight all year when revenue was up. Bad monthly books make it impossible to connect the dots. You find out what happened a year after it did.
GREAT
REVENUE.
NO
CASH.
This is the most common story in restoration. A $3M year. A $4M year. And somehow, you’re borrowing from your line of credit in February.
Restoration has the most deceptive cashflow structure of any trade. You bill a job in October. The carrier approves it — minus the deductible, minus the depreciation holdback, minus the TPA fee — in December. You collect the ACV portion in January. The RCV holdback comes in March. Meanwhile, you paid your crew in October, your subs in November, and your equipment vendor in December.
You were profitable the whole time. But you were also broke for four months.
The only way to manage this without getting caught is with a real 13-week cash forecast — built on accurate AR aging, broken down by carrier, by TPA program, by job stage. That’s not something a generalist bookkeeper builds. It’s what we build for every single client.
The jobs that made you money.
And the ones that bled you.
This is what a real monthly job-level P&L looks like once we’ve done a Cat3 cleanup. Scroll through. Notice how few rows it takes to find a six-figure problem.
This job looked profitable. It wasn’t. Three approved supplements never made it into the books — that’s a $13,200 leak on a single rebuild.
The whole Code Blue program is unprofitable. Six jobs, $58K of revenue, losing $6,402. You’d never see this without job-level P&L. The owner kept taking these jobs because “they pay fast.”
$13,200 missed supplements
Approved by carrier. Never booked. Single rebuild job. Found inside week 2 of cleanup.
$6,402 TPA program loss
Code Blue program is below margin. Drop it, renegotiate it, or absorb it knowingly.
8 points of margin recovered
Average uplift Cat3 Books clients see in the first 90 days after cleanup.
Two of six jobs were losing money. You can’t see that without job costing. We make it impossible not to see.
You’re leaving money
on the table.
Here’s where.
The average restoration company leaks $50,000–$500,000 a year — and the owner can't see it on the P&L. This free 7-lesson course takes you from "am I actually profitable?" to the exact money you're leaving on the table, and how to take it back.
- 01Is Your Restoration Company Actually Profitable? 5 Numbers Every Owner Should Be Able to Answer◆ Start here02Restoration Company Financial Benchmarks: What Gross Margin, AR, and Net Profit Should Look Like at $1M, $3M, and $5M03Why Most Restoration Companies Plateau Below 15% Net Margin (And How to Break Through)04The 10 Hidden Profit Leaks Costing Restoration Companies $50K–$500K Per Year05Why Your Supplements Disappear Between Xactimate and QuickBooks — and How to Plug the Leak06How Restoration Companies Actually Make Money: The 7 Profit Levers That Move the Needle07From Survival to Scale: The Profitability Roadmap for Restoration Companies at Every Revenue Stage
Job costing isn’t a feature.
It’s the whole point.
Without job-level P&L, your financials tell you what you made in total. They don’t tell you why, where, or on which jobs. That distinction is the difference between a restoration business that scales intentionally and one that grows itself into insolvency.
- Revenue is a total number with no job-level breakdown
- You don't know if mitigation or reconstruction is more profitable
- TPA programs all look the same — you can't tell which ones to drop
- Labor costs exist, but not by job — just a total payroll line
- Material purchases are expenses, not job-level costs
- Subcontractor costs aren't tied to the jobs they came from
- Estimating the next job is based on gut, not data
- Every job has a real P&L — labor, materials, subs, equipment, overhead
- Margin by job type, job size, carrier, and TPA program
- Instantly see which programs are worth staying on
- Labor costs allocated to jobs in real time via expense management
- Every Home Depot run tagged to a project before the receipt disappears
- Subcontractor invoices coded to jobs the moment they come in
- Next estimate is built on what the last job actually cost
Better Estimates
Price future jobs based on what identical past jobs actually cost — not what you hoped they would cost.
Margin Clarity
Know your gross margin by job type, crew, carrier, and TPA program. See exactly where the money is going.
Smarter Growth
Hire the right crew, drop the wrong programs, focus on the job types that actually make you money.
Everything your books need.
Nothing they don’t.
Cat3 Books handles the complete bookkeeping stack for restoration companies — built around the way your money actually moves. We speak your language because we only work in your industry. No restaurants. No retail. No e-commerce. Restoration only.
Job Costing ★ CORE
Every project gets a complete P&L — labor, materials, equipment, subcontractors, TPA fees, and overhead. Every month, without exception.
Core DifferentiatorSupplement Tracking ★ CORE
Every supplement tracked from submission through carrier approval to final payment. Monthly recovery report showing what was collected and what's still outstanding.
Industry ExclusiveEstimate-to-Books Mapping
We bridge the gap between your estimating platform and your accounting software. Xactimate, Albi, Dash, JobNimbus — all mapped correctly into your books.
TPA Channel AR
Contractor Connection, Alacrity, Sedgwick, Code Blue — each tracked on its own aging schedule. Know exactly who owes what, by program, and for how long.
Sub & 1099 Management
W-9 collection, COI tracking, sub costs coded to jobs, and 1099 filing handled. Full audit trail from dispatch to payment, year-round — not just in January.
Equipment Revenue & Asset Tracking
Drying equipment is a daily billable line item. We reconcile equipment-day logs against invoices so no billable day disappears. Depreciation schedules maintained separately.
Monthly Close & Reporting
Clean close by the 15th, every month. P&L, balance sheet, job profitability summary, supplement recovery report. CPA-ready. Always.
Historical Cleanup
If your books are a Category 3 situation — and most are when we start — we remediate first. Full chart-of-accounts rebuild, transaction reclassification, missed supplement recovery.
QBO + ERP Setup & Migration
QuickBooks Online and Desktop, Sage 100, Acumatica, Foundation. We set up, migrate, and maintain your accounting platform — properly configured for restoration job costing from day one.
Expense Management with Job-Coded Cards
Stop losing receipts. Stop reconstructing expenses at month-end. Stop asking your crew what that Home Depot run was for.
We implement a complete expense management system — physical or virtual cards for your team, with every purchase automatically categorized and every receipt captured in the field via phone. Each transaction routes directly to the correct job cost code in real time.
Your project manager swipes the card on site. The receipt hits the system in 30 seconds. By the time the monthly close comes, the job-level cost data is already there — no manual entry, no missing receipts, no end-of-month scramble.
Cash flow planning, AP cash-flow recommendations, AR and cash-position reporting, quarterly reporting, CEO dashboard, and payroll are not part of the standard bookkeeping package. These require strategic financial oversight that goes beyond bookkeeping. All of them are included in our Fractional CFO Package. Payroll processing can be added to either package for $400 per pay cycle.
Flat monthly pricing.
No matter the volume.
Three packages, three prices. You’re never billed on your revenue, your job count, or our hours — every package is fully done-for-you for one flat monthly fee. Forty jobs a year or four hundred, the price is the price. No annual contract, cancel anytime.
Bookkeeping
Clean, current, restoration-ready books — done for you, every month.
- Full monthly bookkeeping & bank reconciliation
- Restoration-specific chart of accounts
- Supplement recovery tracking & monthly report
- TPA channel AR aging by program
- Subcontractor W-9, COI & 1099 management
- Equipment revenue & asset tracking
- Monthly close by the 15th, every month
- CPA-ready financials, year-round
- Monthly review call
+ Job Costing
Everything in Bookkeeping, plus the true margin on every single job.
- Everything in Bookkeeping, plus —
- Job costing on every project — labor, materials, equipment, subs, overhead
- Job-level P&L, every job, every month
- Estimate-to-books mapping (Xactimate, Albi, Dash, JobNimbus)
- Margin by job type, carrier & TPA program
- True job margin before you send the invoice
- Field receipts tagged to the right job, every week
+ Fractional CFO
Everything in Job Costing, plus a fractional CFO in your corner.
- Everything in Job Costing, plus —
- Automated AP intake — systems to drop bills into QuickBooks the easy way (no bill pay)
- Biweekly AP recommendations to maximize cash flow efficiency
- AR aging & cash-position reporting (reporting, not collections servicing)
- 13-week rolling cash flow forecast
- CEO dashboard — KPIs, job mix, TPA performance
- Budget vs. actual & quarterly reporting package
- Banking, lending & bonding support
- Monthly CFO advisory call (60 min)
- Tax strategy coordination with your CPA
“Three years of QuickBooks that looked like a Category 3 bathroom. They came in, assessed it, and had us cleaned up in six weeks. We found $94,000 in uncollected supplements — money my previous bookkeeper didn’t even know existed. The books we have now are unrecognizable compared to what we had before.”
Three more restoration owners
who’ve been on the wrong side
of bad books.
Anonymized only on request. Real companies, real numbers, real engagements between 6 and 28 months.
“Our supplements were a black hole. Submit, hope, never see them again. Three months in we had a monthly recovery report I actually trusted — $47K we’d already written off in our heads showed up in the bank.”
“I thought our books were fine. Their team walked me through job-by-job margins from last quarter and two of my biggest ‘wins’ had been break-even at best. Changed who I bid for the next month.”
“We hired Cat3 to get clean before our line-of-credit renewal. Our bank’s commercial RM actually called to ask who’d prepared the statements. That had never happened.”
What an actual
Cat3 cleanup looks like.
$1.8M water & mitigation contractor, Southeast region. Three years of QuickBooks built by a generalist bookkeeper. No job costing. Supplements tracked in a spreadsheet nobody updated.
Owner couldn’t answer the question “did we make money last month?” without two days of digging. Margin sliding for three quarters running. CPA asked twice for the same backup.
$38K in previously-written-off supplements recovered. Two TPA programs renegotiated. Owner now bids from real cost data, not memory. Bank renewed the line of credit at a tighter rate.
“For the first time, I can answer the question ‘did we make money this month’ without making something up.”
— Owner · $1.8M Restoration Co. · Southeast US · Name on request
The fractional CFO
who works in restoration.
Only restoration.
I’m Burke — a fractional CFO. I’ve built and sold businesses, job-costed 100+ construction projects, and sat in the CFO seat of a restoration company running 400+ jobs a year. I’ve stood where you’re standing.
I could take CFO work in any industry. I don’t. Restoration is the only place I work — because ACV vs. RCV, supplements, TPA timing, and equipment billing add up to their own discipline, and you deserve a CFO who thinks about nothing else. My job is to hand you the numbers so the calls stay yours. You don’t have to become a numbers person — you just need one on your side of the table.
Built and sold businesses in several industries. I know the books behind most kinds of enterprise.
Ran aggressive job costing on over 100 projects — where project margin really lives once the field gets involved.
Walked in with no costs tied to jobs and no view of profit. Built the job-costing system that showed true margin before invoices went out — and cut the tax bill while net profit climbed.
Tight team, heavy lifting done myself, DBA in Financial Management underway — for restoration operators who need a numbers person in their corner.
Restoration only.
Always.
Cat3 Books serves restoration companies exclusively. Water, fire, mold, storm — that’s our entire world. We didn’t add a restoration page to a generalist firm’s website. We built this from the ground up for one industry, because restoration bookkeeping is different enough to deserve a firm that thinks about nothing else.
Every bookkeeper on our team is trained on how restoration money moves. The difference between ACV and RCV. Why TPA programs require separate revenue tracking. What a supplement is and why it needs its own line. How equipment billing works. Why cash flow in restoration is so deceptive.
When your books need to support a bank line, a bonding application, a new line of credit, or a serious conversation with your CPA — they’re built to hold up under scrutiny.
STOP
DRIVING
BLIND.
We look at your actual books. Tell you exactly what category they’re in. Quantify what it’s costing you. And give you a clear remediation plan — whether you hire us or not.