Sales tax, estimated taxes, paying subcontractors, pricing a service call and getting paid on time. Written for owners running a small crew in the US and Canada, with the official sources linked.
You open the wall and the job is bigger than the quote. What happens in the next five minutes decides whether you get paid for the extra work or eat it. Here is the habit that protects you, the paperwork that makes it stick, and what to say when the customer tells you to just keep going.
Flat rate pays you for the work instead of the hours, and it only holds up on jobs you know. Here is how to build a flat price from your own numbers, what to do when a job runs long, and how to switch one job type at a time without guessing.
Your costs moved and your price did not. Here is how to set the new number from your own books, when to put it in, the words to use on the phone, and the arithmetic that tells you how much work you can lose and still be ahead.
The truck is usually the second biggest cost in a trades business, after what you pay yourself and your crew. The United States and Canada let you deduct it in two completely different ways, and 2026 has a twist in the middle of the year that will catch people out.
For payments made in 2026, the US reporting threshold for Form 1099-NEC went from $600 to $2,000. Here is what to collect before you pay a sub, what to file after the year ends, and how Canada's T5018 works for construction businesses.
Size a deposit from the material you have to buy and how long the job runs. Set terms that match who the customer is, invoice before you leave, and follow up in a fixed order. Liens and late fees are real tools, but only if you set them up before the work starts.
Once your taxable revenue passes $30,000 over four calendar quarters, you have to register and charge GST or HST on your work. What follows is how the test works, the rate in each province and territory, what your invoices must show, and when the quick method makes filing simpler.
Start from what an hour of your billable time really costs, then pick a call fee that tells the customer exactly what they are paying for. The math fits on a calculator and the phone answer fits in two sentences.
Nobody withholds tax from the checks your customers hand you, so the IRS expects you to pay it four times a year. Here are the 2026 dates, the rules that keep you clear of a penalty, and a simple way to set the money aside as it comes in.
It depends on the state, and within a state it depends on what you worked on and how you wrote the invoice. Here is how to sort any job into the right bucket, with four states that show how far apart the rules are.
Join the early access list. We email when something is worth your time, and not otherwise.