Bookkeeping for electrical shops. Finally know which jobs actually made money.
Built for shops doing $750K–$3M in revenue with 2–6 trucks. Powered by AI agents, reviewed by a former controller. Works with your existing Jobber or Housecall Pro.
Books closed by the 15th business day · Founder-led onboarding · No long-term contract
Sample report. Your shop's real per-job P&Ls come with every monthly close.
The pain you have today
You didn't get into electrical work to chase down a part-time bookkeeper for last month's P&L.
Your monthly P&L lands 2–3 weeks after the month ends
You're bidding next week's panel upgrades on stale numbers. The part-time bookkeeper turnaround is the bottleneck.
You can't tell which jobs actually made money
A big commercial service call might have been a loss. By the time the P&L lands, you've already bid two more like it.
Field data gets rekeyed into QBO by hand
Jobber or Housecall Pro tracks your jobs. Your books live in QuickBooks. Someone moves data between them manually every month.
How it works in 60 seconds
Connect, sync, review, deliver. The handoff into your books is the part we replace.
Connect your bank, cards, and field-service tool
Plaid links your bank and cards. We bring your Jobber or Housecall Pro data into your books — so job revenue and costs land in the ledger without you rekeying them.
AI agents categorize and reconcile your books
Transactions are categorized against a chart of accounts built for electrical service work, and supply-house costs get matched to the right job.
A controller reviews every customer-facing decision
Austin and team review categorizations, journal entries, and month-end close before anything is final. AI does the work. A human signs off.
Per-job P&L with every monthly close
Want to know if the Main Street panel upgrade made money? Ask Poof's assistant, or text your controller — and get a straight answer instead of a P&L that's three weeks late.
For the full walkthrough — chart of accounts, job costing, prevailing wage, subcontractor 1099s, and a monthly close routine — read the complete guide to electrical contractor bookkeeping.
Replaces your current bookkeeper
Cheaper than QBO + a part-time bookkeeper + manual Jobber handoff. Faster, and with detail they can't deliver.
Your current setup
- QuickBooks Online — you and the bookkeeper share the login
- Jobber or Housecall Pro — field data stays trapped on its own island
- Part-time bookkeeper at $800–$1,500/mo who logs in once a month
- Monthly P&L 2–3 weeks late, in a PDF, with no per-job detail
- Year-end 1099 fire drill across spreadsheets and email threads
Your new setup
- Poof handles categorization and reconciliation, with controller review on every decision
- Your Jobber and Housecall Pro job data flows into the ledger — no manual rekeying
- Managed-service tier at $1,200/mo — a controller-grade service, not a part-time login
- Monthly close with per-job P&L, closed by the 15th business day — you finally see which jobs made money, and which lost it
- 1099-ready every January — subs tracked all year, not the week before the deadline
Every call answered. Every job on the board.
Managed customers can have Poof answer the shop's line. An AI receptionist picks up, works out what the caller needs, books a real slot on a real tech's calendar, dispatches the tech, and escalates anything unsafe to a person. The revenue that used to go to voicemail lands on the board instead — and the job it creates gets costed like every other job on your P&L.
It answers, and it books
The agent knows your shop’s name, hours, and service area. It works out what the caller needs and puts the job on the board — at 9pm, on a Saturday, or while every tech is on a roof.
Safety calls are decided in code, not by AI
Gas smell, carbon monoxide, smoke, sparking, or an active alarm trigger an immediate emergency escalation and a scripted “leave the building, call 911” response. No heat below 45°F and no cool above 95°F are emergencies too. These are rules in the software — the AI narrates the call, it never decides what counts as an emergency.
It books against real availability
Slots come from your technicians, their weekly windows, and their time off, minus what is already booked, with drive-time buffer respected. Skills are a preference rather than a gate — a tech tagged for the work is preferred, an untagged tech is next — so a shop that has never tagged anyone is still never told it has no availability. The database refuses overlapping bookings outright, so two calls landing at once cannot double-book a tech.
It knows when to hand off
A safety trigger, an after-hours emergency, no slot inside the urgency window, a caller who asks for a person, a repeat caller within 24 hours, a cancellation threat, or low confidence — any of these route the call to a human.
Then it dispatches — or waits for you
Two independent switches: whether the AI picks who goes, and whether the system texts them. Leave both on and the assigned tech gets their job on their phone. Turn the first off and the booking still stands with the customer’s promised window — the job just lands under “Needs a tech” for whoever staffs your board.
The caller becomes a customer immediately
A booked job creates the customer record on the first call, not weeks later when someone finally invoices it. Matching runs on the last ten digits of the number, so the same household calling from a different phone format stays one customer instead of becoming two.
The work spreads across the crew
When several techs are free for the same slot, the job goes to whoever has the fewest jobs that day, then the fewest that week. Nobody quietly absorbs every call — which is the kind of thing that stays invisible until a good tech burns out.
A job nobody is going to raises the alarm
An appointment approaching its start time with no tech assigned escalates to you — whether that is because you dispatch by hand or because nobody was free when it was booked. Emergencies are assigned automatically regardless of how you have set the switches.
Versus an answering service
An answering service runs $200–$600/mo to take a message and, on a good day, drop it into a calendar. It doesn't know your books, which of your techs is certified for the work, or which calls are emergencies. Poof's receptionist books against real availability, escalates the unsafe ones by rule, and the job it creates gets costed like every other job on your P&L.
What it does not do
We install it for you as part of the managed service — we provision the number and the voice agent. It is not a switch you flip yourself. Customer-facing texts are not built yet: no booking confirmation, no reminder, no “your tech is on the way.” Your technician does get texted their job — your customer does not. It does not take payment on the call, does not optimize routes across the day's board, and does not clone your voice. There are no outbound sales calls. We would rather tell you that now than after you have signed.
Your tech closes the job from a text. The invoice writes itself.
The gap between the work getting done and the work getting billed is where trade shops lose money and time. Poof closes it without asking your techs to learn anything.
The tech gets a text
A link that opens exactly their job. No account, no password, no app to install — which is the honest answer to “my guys won’t use another app.” The link is signed and can be revoked, and rescheduling invalidates it automatically.
They work the job from their phone
On-my-way, arrived, and completed times recorded when they happen, not guessed at afterwards. What was wrong, what was done, what still needs doing. Equipment make, model, and serial. Photos — before, after, nameplate, receipt.
Parts and labor get logged by the person who knows
Each line tagged as labor, part, or fee at the jobsite by the tech who put it there. That is what makes the margin on the job real, instead of something the office infers from a description a week later.
They tap Complete, and the invoice exists
A draft invoice is waiting in the office with the tech’s own words on it, ready for review. Nobody retypes a paper ticket. And the completed call becomes a job — linked to the customer, with the invoice tagged to it, so it reaches your Per-Job P&L without anyone remembering to tag anything.
Your office reads it before your customer does
The dispatcher opens the field report from the board — what the tech wrote, the photos, the parts and labor, the customer’s sign-off, and the draft invoice it produced. The tech’s internal notes are shown marked as never reaching the customer. Nothing goes out until a person sends it.
Your supply-house receipt stays yours
Every jobsite photo is opted in or out of the customer's invoice individually, and the receipt showing what you paid for the part defaults to not printing. A photo of your cost can never reach a customer by accident.
An invoice that looks like trade work
Diagnosis, work performed, recommended follow-up, equipment, and warranty print under real headings, with the opted-in photos beneath them. Not a one-line “HVAC service call — $458” that invites a phone call about what it was for.
What the tech's page does not do
No GPS tracking — we are not building a way to watch your crew. It does not take payment on site. It records a typed name and a timestamp rather than a drawn signature. And it needs a signal: there is no offline mode, so a basement with no bars means the tech fills it in when they are back in the truck. Scheduling and re-routing stay on the dispatch board, not the tech's phone.
Pricing built for trade shops
Replaces a part-time bookkeeper, and delivers detail they can't. No long-term contract.
Job Margin & Recovery Audit
Before you commit to anything monthly, we go through your last 12 months of jobs and bank activity and hand you a number: the margin you are leaving on the table, and where it is going. Five days from the day we get your data.
- Per-job margin on your last 12 months of completed jobs
- Where the leaks are — underbilled work, uncosted labor, financing fees eating installs
- A dollar figure for what it is costing you a year
- Credits in full against the $1,500 onboarding if you sign within 30 days
one week, paid
Book a 20-minute call to kick it off. No monthly commitment to find out.
Poof Managed for Trades
2–4 truck shops, $750K–$1.5M revenue
- All Poof Professional features included
- Per-job P&L with every monthly close
- Monthly close + controller review
- Jobber / Housecall Pro data brought into your books
- A controller you can text or email
- Monthly variance review
Poof Managed for Trades Plus
5+ truck shops, $1.5M–$3M revenue
- Everything in Managed for Trades
- Multi-location reporting
- Quarterly review call
- Priority response
Onboarding (one-time)
Historical cleanup up to 18 months, QBO or Xero migration, Jobber / Housecall Pro setup, chart of accounts aligned to electrical service work. Your $750 audit credits against this in full if you sign within 30 days.
What we commit to
On every managed plan. Not aspirations — the deal.
- Books closed by the 15th business day, every month
- Every completed job costed within 5 business days
- An unbilled-work report every Friday
- Your controller responds within 1 business day
Above $3M in revenue? Poof Managed for Trades Pro starts at $2,400/mo, scoped per shop. Book a call and we'll size it with you.
Not sure which tier fits? Book a 20-minute call. We'll be straight about whether Poof makes sense for your shop.
Austin Semple — 10+ years of audit and controller work
Before Poof, Austin spent a decade auditing and running the books for small service businesses. The pattern was always the same: an owner who built a real business from a service truck, paying $800–$1,500/mo for a bookkeeper who delivered a PDF three weeks late and couldn't answer the one question that mattered — “which jobs made money?”
Poof Managed for Trades is built on that experience. AI agents do the volume work. A credentialed human signs off on every customer-facing decision. The ledger underneath is real double-entry bookkeeping with reversal entries — built to survive any IRS or insurance audit.
Austin personally onboards the first 50 shops. If that's you, you're working directly with the founder.
Questions shop owners ask
What is the $750 Job Margin & Recovery Audit?
A paid, one-week diagnostic — the way most shops start with us. We take your last 12 months of jobs and bank activity and hand you a dollar number in five days: what your real per-job margins are, where money is leaking (underbilled work, labor that never got costed to a job, financing fees quietly eating installs), and what it adds up to over a year. It is $750, it is not refundable, and it credits in full against the $1,500 onboarding if you sign within 30 days. We do not do a free version — a free audit attracts people who were never going to buy, and you would get a worse look at your own numbers.
What do you actually commit to once I am a client?
Four things, in writing. Your books are closed by the 15th business day, every month. Every completed job is costed within 5 business days. You get an unbilled-work report every Friday. And your controller responds within 1 business day. If we miss, you will hear it from us first.
Do I need to switch from Jobber or Housecall Pro?
No. Keep using exactly what your techs use today. We bring your Jobber or Housecall Pro data into your books for you — your dispatcher and techs see no change. The handoff into your books is what we replace, not the field tool.
Do you handle prevailing wage and certified payroll?
For shops that work prevailing-wage jobs, we coordinate with your payroll provider (Gusto, ADP, Paychex) on the bookkeeping side. We don't file certified payroll reports ourselves, but we make sure the job costing reflects the right loaded labor rates for prevailing-wage hours.
Will my CPA still work with me at tax time?
Yes — and they'll be happier. We deliver clean, audit-grade books on accrual or cash basis with full general ledger access. We coordinate with your CPA at year-end so 1099 filings and tax prep land without the usual scramble.
Is this real bookkeeping or just AI guessing?
Real bookkeeping. Every customer-facing decision is reviewed by a credentialed human — Austin or someone on his team, with audit and controller experience. The AI does the volume work. The human signs off on the calls that matter. The ledger is real double-entry with reversal entries, built to survive any IRS or insurance audit.
What if I want to leave?
You take everything with you. Export your full QBO file anytime — no data lock-in, no exit fees. We'd rather you stay because the service is worth it, not because leaving is painful.
How is this different from my current bookkeeper?
Three differences. Granularity: per-job P&L on every close, which most part-time bookkeepers can't deliver at any price. Accountability: a former controller reviewing the work, with an audit-grade ledger underneath. Responsiveness: a real person you can text about a specific job, not someone who logs in once a month.
Do you work with residential service, commercial, or both?
Residential service is the sweet spot. We work with commercial shops too, but mostly service work — not large new-construction or industrial. Book a call and we'll be straight about whether your mix is a fit.
Per-job profit on every monthly close. Starts at $1,200/mo.
Book a 20-minute call with Austin. We'll look at your current setup and give you a straight answer on whether Poof fits.