How an HVAC Contractor Turned Disorganized Books into a Business Built to Grow

Service: Accounting Oversight, Financial Planning & Strategy, Tax Readiness | Stratovus CFO Services
Client: HVAC Contractor | S-corp | 5 employees | $799,500 revenue

Introduction

This HVAC business was generating nearly $800,000 a year and still felt like it was running paycheck to paycheck. The owner knew how to run a crew. He knew how to close jobs. What he didn’t know was whether the business was actually working for him.

Vendor payments were going out late. Job margins were unclear. Tax season brought a bill instead of a plan. The books existed, but no one was using them to make decisions. When the owner came to Stratovus, he wasn’t in crisis. He was stuck, and he knew it.

The Starting Point

Before any financial planning could happen, the books needed to be dealt with. Three years of records had never been reconciled end to end. Accounts were inconsistent across all five bank and credit accounts. Vendor balances were unreliable. There was no clear picture of what the business owed, what it owned, or what it had actually earned.

The owner had been making decisions, including hiring, equipment purchases, and pricing, off of bank balances. That approach works until it doesn’t. At $800K in revenue, it had already stopped working.

Phase One: Getting the Books Right

The engagement started with a Finance Reset. Every account was reconciled. Twelve months of transactions were reviewed and corrected. Vendor balances were brought current and a consistent close process was established so the owner would never again be working from stale numbers.

The Finance Reset also surfaced what the books had been hiding: a tax position that had no planning behind it and margin data that had never been tracked at the job level.

Phase Two: Building Reporting That Actually Gets Used

With clean books in place, the next step was building reporting the owner would look at every month. That meant tracking what actually mattered for an HVAC business: labor cost per tech, margin per job, and fixed cost coverage.

A real-time dashboard was set up showing cash on hand, accounts receivable aging, fuel efficiency by vehicle, revenue per tech, and budget-to-actual variances. Monthly reviews were added to the calendar. For the first time, the owner could answer basic questions about his own business without waiting for his accountant to call back.

Phase Three: Ongoing Stratovus CFO Engagement

With reporting in place, the owner moved into a full Stratovus CFO engagement covering Accounting Oversight, Financial Planning and Strategy, and Tax Readiness. Dan now leads the financial function of the business month to month, coordinating with the owner’s tax preparer and Stratovus’s accounting partner to keep everything current and aligned.

The questions that had been sitting unanswered started getting answered. Can I hire a second crew? The numbers said yes, with one condition. Are my prices covering my actual costs? Not on two service lines. What will taxes look like this year? Now there’s a number, not a surprise.

Conclusion

This business didn’t have a revenue problem. It had a visibility problem. At nearly $800,000 in annual revenue, the owner was making every major financial decision without a clear picture of where the business stood. When the numbers are finally in order and someone is watching them every month, the decisions change. So do the results.