Restoration Chart of Accounts: Free CSV Template

Restoration books fail in a way no other trade's do. Most of the money comes from insurance carriers, who pay on their own schedule, and often not the full invoice. The default small-business chart of accounts has one Sales account and one Accounts Receivable account. It cannot show you how much the carriers cut, who actually owes you the money that is outstanding, or whether mitigation or rebuild is carrying the business.

This is a working chart of accounts for a water, fire, and mold restoration company, account by account, with the reason each one exists.

Free download: Restoration chart of accounts template (CSV), the structure in this guide as 60 numbered accounts with types, subtypes, and a one-line note on why each exists. Imports into QuickBooks Online, Xero, and most accounting software. No email required.

Why the default template fails restoration companies

Three things are true of restoration that are not true of a generic service business.

The invoice is not the revenue. You bill from an estimate, the adjuster reviews it, and what gets paid is often less. If the difference is written off as bad debt or the invoice is quietly edited down, you never learn your reduction rate, which is the number that tells you which carriers and which job types are worth the work.

Several parties owe you on one job. The carrier owes the covered amount, the homeowner owes the deductible and any non-covered work, and on a large claim the mortgage company may hold the check and release it in draws. One receivable account blends all three.

Work runs ahead of the invoice. A water job can run for a week or more of drying before anything is billed, and rebuild estimates wait for approval. Without an account for unbilled work, revenue lands in the month the paperwork cleared, not the month the work was done.

Income accounts

The split that matters most is mitigation from reconstruction. They are two businesses under one roof. Mitigation is fast, equipment-heavy, and usually higher margin. Reconstruction is slower, sub-heavy, and competes with general contractors. Blend them and a strong mitigation month hides a rebuild job that lost money.

Carrier reductions sits right under revenue. It keeps what you billed and what you were paid on the same page, so the reduction rate is one division away.

Cost of goods sold

COGS is for costs that exist because a specific job exists.

Program fees are the one most shops get wrong. If you take program work, the fee is a percentage of that job and belongs in its cost, not in marketing. In marketing it makes program jobs look as profitable as your direct work, and they may not be.

Owned drying equipment is not in this list because it is a fixed asset, depreciated over its life. Keep your own equipment and rented equipment apart. The rental line tells you when you are short on equipment, and comparing drying revenue with the depreciation on your own fleet tells you whether buying more would pay.

Balance sheet accounts restoration companies are missing

The homeowner receivable is the one to set up today. Deductibles are the easiest money on the job to lose, because the carrier balance gets all the attention and nobody asks the homeowner until months later. Its own account puts it on the aging where someone will see it.

Operating expenses

Standard, with three restoration-specific splits. Keep estimating software on its own line, because it is a large fixed cost. Keep referral and lead fees apart from general marketing, so you can see what a job costs to win from each source. And keep on-call and after-hours premiums visible, either as their own labor line or through payroll reports, because a 24-hour business pays for being available whether or not the phone rings.

Setting it up without breaking your history

1. Change at a period boundary, the start of a quarter or year.
2. Rename before you create. If "Sales" becomes "Water mitigation revenue," renaming keeps the history. Creating a new account splits it.
3. Merge rather than delete. Deleting an account with transactions either fails or orphans data.
4. Map old to new in writing before you touch anything, so you can restate the prior year.
5. Reclassify open receivables into carrier, homeowner, and mortgage company on the day you switch, so the new aging is right from the start.

And if you use bank rules to keep the new accounts filled, write them narrowly and check quarterly what they actually caught. A rule that files every supply-house charge to consumables will file the rebuild materials there too. What that costs is a post of its own.

What good looks like

Once the structure is right, your books answer these without a spreadsheet:

• What was mitigation margin last month, and reconstruction margin separately?
• What share of what we billed did carriers cut, and which carriers cut most?
• How much do carriers owe us, how much do homeowners owe us, and how old is each?
• How much work did we do this month that has not been invoiced?
• Do program jobs make money once the program fee is counted?

If your books cannot answer those, the chart of accounts is the problem, not the bookkeeper. Once they can, the next step is per-job costing, so those numbers exist for each loss and not just the month.

The restoration chart of accounts template (CSV) has all 60 accounts numbered and ready to import. For other insurance-heavy work, see the roofing chart of accounts. For rebuild-heavy shops, see the general contractor chart of accounts.

*Written by Austin Semple, a former controller: three years in audit, seven running the books for small businesses, and the founder of Poof. Poof holds deposits as a liability and releases them on completion, tracks profit per job from the bills and invoices tagged to it, and closes the books within five business days or the next month is free. Start a 30-day trial, no card required.*