Facility Services
Bookkeeping for property management, building maintenance, and security companies serving commercial clients.
The Industry
Facility services sits on the commercial side of building upkeep. Your clients are property managers, REITs, asset managers, and building owners, not homeowners. Contracts run monthly with extra work orders layered on top. Every invoice gets reviewed by an accounting department because your charges roll into operating expenses that either hit an owner’s NOI or get passed through to tenants as CAM recoveries. That scrutiny is a fact of life in this lane.
The accounting problem is not the service itself. It is tracking labor, supplies, and equipment across a portfolio of client sites while keeping billing clean enough for commercial clients to approve quickly. One account might be six buildings with different billing terms. A security contract might cover three posts across two campuses with different hour requirements. Margins live in the details, and without site-level visibility you cannot see where they are going.
Who This Covers
Who This Covers
Commercial property management firms, building maintenance operators, HVAC and mechanical service contractors, commercial security companies, alarm monitoring providers, elevator servicing, parking lot sweeping, and handyman operations serving commercial portfolios across LA County.
What Complicates It
What Complicates It
Labor needs to be tracked by site, not just totaled. Recurring contracts plus separately billed work orders. Payroll for a distributed workforce spread across multiple client properties. Insurance, bonding, and licensing compliance especially for security. Commercial AR with net 30 to 60 terms. Invoice documentation requirements set by the client, not by you.
What We Handle
The first priority is labor allocation. People are your biggest cost, and if payroll hits the books as one number every two weeks you cannot tell which contracts make money. We set up job costing so payroll runs get split by site using whatever time tracking system fits your operation. Supplies, vehicles, and supervisor time follow the same logic. Allocated where they were used, not dumped into overhead.
The second priority is clean billing. Dennis spent years on the property management side reviewing vendor invoices for CAM reconciliations and operating expense reports. He knows what property managers look for, how invoices get coded into building-level budgets, and why certain bills sit unpaid for weeks. That perspective translates directly into formatting your invoices so they get approved the first time instead of bouncing back for corrections.
Site-Level Profitability
Site-Level Profitability
Payroll allocated across client sites. Supplies and equipment costs assigned to the accounts where they were consumed. Reports that show margin per contract after all direct costs. You see which client relationships are carrying the business and which ones need a rate increase or a conversation about scope.
Commercial AR and Billing
Commercial AR and Billing
Invoices formatted to match what property management accounting departments expect to see. AR aging tracked weekly so sliding balances get caught at 45 days instead of 75. For contracts billing into CAM pools or operating expense pass-throughs, we know what backup documentation the client will eventually request.
What Goes Wrong
The most common failure is labor that never gets allocated. Payroll runs every two weeks as a lump sum. Nobody breaks it out by site or contract. When the owner asks whether the medical office portfolio is profitable, the answer is a shrug because the data does not exist. The contract might be losing money every month, but without site-level tracking it hides inside an acceptable company-wide gross margin.
The other failure is slow AR. Commercial clients do not pay like residential ones. Net 30 becomes net 45, then net 60. Property management accounting teams process vendor invoices in batches, and if your bill is missing a building code, a work order reference, or a proper breakdown of hours and rates, it gets set aside until someone calls to ask about it. Meanwhile your crew gets paid every Friday and supply vendors want their money on 30-day terms. That timing gap is where facility service operators burn through working capital without realizing it.
Labor Lost in Overhead
Labor Lost in Overhead
Total payroll posts as one line. Supervisor hours never allocated. Travel time between sites ignored. Company-wide margin might look healthy while specific contracts are running at a loss. Renewal conversations and new bids get priced off instinct instead of data, and the same mistakes repeat on the next deal.
Receivables That Stop Moving
Receivables That Stop Moving
A $15,000 balance from a large property manager sits for 80 days because an invoice was missing a reference code. Nobody followed up. The accounts receivable report never gets reviewed. Cash flow tightens, payroll stays the same, and the line of credit fills the gap. None of this is necessary with systematic AR management.
What Changes
You know which contracts make money. Site-level data shows that the Class A office account runs at 24 percent margin while the industrial portfolio runs at 7 percent because crew windshield time eats the day. Pricing decisions get made with actual numbers. When a client pushes back on a renewal, you can walk through exactly what the scope costs to deliver. Bids on new work start with historical data instead of guesses.
Invoices go out clean and come back paid. AR aging stays under 45 days because the follow-up process runs on schedule. Having someone on your side who understands how commercial clients process vendor invoices means fewer rejections and fewer collection calls. The gap between paying your crew and collecting from clients closes, and the business stops feeling cash-starved during months that should be strong.
Pricing Backed by Real Numbers
Pricing Backed by Real Numbers
Renewal and bid pricing grounded in site-level profitability. Unprofitable accounts either get repriced or walked away from without regret. Scope creep on existing contracts gets caught and billed instead of absorbed. The quiet losses that used to hide inside monthly totals stop happening.
Cash Flow That Works
Cash Flow That Works
Invoicing standardized to match commercial client expectations. AR aging worked every week instead of every quarter. Receivables collected in 30 to 45 days rather than 60 to 90. Payroll, supplies, and vendor payments funded from collections instead of a credit line, which compounds into real retained earnings over a year.
Pasadena's Small Business Bookkeeper
The Next Step:
A 15-Minute Call
Tell us where your books stand today. We'll ask a few questions, share how we can help, and give you a clear quote.