Jobber and Housecall Pro are great at running the field side of a trade business: scheduling, quotes, invoices, and getting paid. Both can sync with QuickBooks Online, which should mean less data entry. But a sync that is set up wrong can quietly make your books worse, not better.
Here are the six mistakes we see most often, and how to avoid them. Menus and settings change over time, so check the current setup guide in your app for the exact clicks. The accounting ideas below stay the same.
1. Counting the same income twice
This is the big one. The sync sends your invoices and payments into QuickBooks. Then the deposit shows up in your bank feed, and someone categorizes it as income too. Now your revenue is doubled and your taxes are overstated.
The fix: when the deposit shows up in the bank feed, match it to the payments that already synced instead of adding it as new income.
2. Ignoring payment processing fees
When customers pay by card through Jobber Payments or Housecall Pro's payment processing, the deposit that hits your bank is usually the total minus fees, and several payments are often grouped into one deposit. If you only record what landed in the bank, your income is understated and your fees disappear.
The fix: record the full payment amounts, then record the processing fees as an expense so the total matches the actual deposit. Your fees are a real cost of doing business and a deduction.
3. Every product and service going to one income account
Your field software has a list of services and products. In QuickBooks, each one should map to the right income account. If everything lands in one generic "Sales" account, you cannot tell how much comes from service calls versus installs versus maintenance agreements.
The fix: set up a few meaningful income accounts (for example service, installation, and maintenance plans) and map each item to one of them.
4. Sales tax set up in one place but not the other
If sales tax rates are set up differently in your field software and in QuickBooks, your sales tax liability will not match what you actually collected. That causes headaches at filing time.
The fix: decide which system is in charge of tax rates, keep them matched, and reconcile the sales tax liability account every time you file. Sales tax on materials works differently for contractors than for most businesses, so it is worth getting this right. See our guide to sales tax on construction materials.
5. Duplicate customers
"Smith, John", "John Smith", and "John Smith (2)" are three customers in QuickBooks but one person in real life. Duplicates make it impossible to see who owes you money.
The fix: clean up the customer list in QuickBooks before you turn the sync on, and decide on one naming format going forward.
6. Assuming the sync gives you job costing
Your field software knows which job each invoice belongs to. It usually does not know what you spent on that job: the materials from the supply house, the subcontractor, the hours your techs logged. Those costs are entered in QuickBooks, and if they are not tagged to the job there, you have revenue by job but no cost by job.
The fix: for project work, tag costs to the job in QuickBooks (using projects, customers, or classes, depending on how your books are set up). That is what turns a pile of transactions into real job costing.
Want it done for you?
We work with contractors who run Jobber and Housecall Pro every day. Our construction bookkeeping service can set up the sync correctly, clean up what is already there, and keep it right every month.
Written by Tyler Peldo
Founder of TAB Services, a construction bookkeeping, accounting, and fractional CFO firm based in Duluth, MN. More about Tyler