Accounting for painting companies — interior, exterior, commercial.
Job costing, crew payroll, materials margin, and the sales-tax compliance that keeps Colorado painters out of trouble. Built for shops running 1–20 painters.
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Painting is a deceptively complicated business to run. The labor portion of every job is what funds payroll. The materials portion is barely a margin contributor. Mix the two together in your books and you cannot tell whether you are pricing right. Add in the seasonal swing of exterior work and the cash flow gap during winter, and the financial planning gets real.
We work with residential interior painters, exterior repaint specialists, and commercial painting subcontractors. The right book setup separates labor revenue from materials revenue, tracks crew productivity per job, and tells you exactly which crews and which job types are funding the company.
What we handle for painting companies
- Job-level P&L separating labor revenue from materials so each is priced correctly.
- Crew productivity reporting — gallons per labor hour, square feet per labor hour, dollars billed per labor dollar.
- Crew payroll with prevailing wage tracking for commercial union work and standard payroll for residential.
- Sales tax on materials sold to customers (Colorado treats painters as contractors-with-resale on most repaints).
- Seasonal cash-flow planning for shops doing heavy exterior work April–October.
- 1099 management for subcontracted crews with misclassification screening.
Pricing
| Shop type | Monthly fee |
|---|---|
| Owner-painter, 1–2 helpers | $400 – $600 |
| 3–8 painters, mostly residential | $600 – $1,000 |
| Commercial painting sub with prevailing wage | $1,000 – $2,000 |
A residential exterior repaint specialist thought their margin was 28%. After we re-coded labor burden (overtime, workers comp at painting class-code rate, vehicles, ladder/spray equipment depreciation) into job cost, the actual margin was 16%. They raised their per-square-foot pricing 12% on new estimates and held the existing book — six months later their margin was back where it should have been.
If you are a one-person shop or owner-with-helper, quarterly bookkeeping is enough.
If you run two or more crews, monthly bookkeeping with crew-level productivity reporting tells you which crews are profitable and which are not.
If you take any commercial union or prevailing-wage work, you need certified payroll set up before the first job starts.
Books that show real margin per crew, per job.
Stop bundling labor and materials. Start pricing each correctly.
Frequently asked questions
Do painters charge sales tax in Colorado?
It depends on the job. New construction is typically a flat contract (no sales tax to customer; tax paid on materials at purchase). Residential repaints often qualify as retail-with-resale where you charge customer sales tax on materials portion. We set up your invoicing to handle both correctly.
How do I track crew productivity?
We track billed dollars per labor hour and gallons per labor hour as KPIs by crew. Differences between crews of 15–20% are common and usually traceable to specific habits. The number is more useful for management than the bottom-line P&L.
Can you handle prevailing wage?
Yes — we run weekly certified payroll (WH-347 federal or state-equivalent) with painter class-code wage rates separate from helper rates, and reconcile fringe benefit accruals.
What is the workers comp class code?
5474 (Painting NOC — typical residential/commercial). 5403 if any structural steel work. We split the wage report by class code at year-end so your audit does not over-rate you.
How do you handle materials returns and warranty work?
Returns reduce COGS in the period received. Warranty work is coded against an internal warranty cost account so it does not distort job-level margin on the original job.