Adam Traywick, LLC - Certified Public Accountant

10/20/2026

A $50 gift card for every tech feels like a thank-you. To the IRS, it's wages.

This one surprises a lot of owners, because the amount is so small. But the IRS is clear: cash and cash equivalents, gift cards included, are never excludable as a de minimis (small, occasional) fringe benefit, no matter how little they're worth. So a gift card goes through payroll like any other pay, with withholding.

Noncash gifts are different. A holiday ham, a company jacket, a turkey for every tech: small, occasional items like those can usually stay off the W-2. The line is cash versus stuff, not big versus small.

Let's look at an example. An HVAC shop hands gift cards to 12 techs in December, straight from the owner's wallet, no payroll. Nobody thinks twice. Then year-end payroll gets reviewed, the cards are sitting outside the W-2s, and January starts with a correction nobody wanted.

If you're planning holiday thank-yous, decide now how they're paid:
1. Cash or gift card bonuses run through payroll, with withholding
2. Small noncash gifts can usually stay off payroll
3. A party for the whole crew is its own category, and usually a friendly one

None of this means skip the thank-you. It means doing it in a way that doesn't need fixing later.

We wrote more about holiday gifts and parties here: https://adamtraywick.com/holiday-gifts-parties/

10/15/2026

If your truck repairs are on your personal card, your books are wrong in two directions at once.

The business is missing an expense it paid for. And your personal account looks like it's spending money on things you never bought for yourself. Multiply that by a year of parts runs, fuel stops, and "we'll sort it out later," and the books stop telling you anything useful.

It happens to good operators. The business card was maxed, or it was in the other truck, or the supply house only took one card. The problem is what it does at year-end: every one of those charges has to be found, proven, and moved, usually from memory, usually in February.

Let's look at an example. A plumbing owner runs about a fifth of the shop's expenses through a personal card over the year. At tax time, half the receipts are gone. Some of those expenses get rebuilt. Some don't, and the ones that don't quietly stop being deductions.

Three things to do while there's still time left in the year:
1. Pull your personal card statements for this year and flag every business charge
2. Get them into the books now, with the receipt or invoice attached
3. Put one business card in every truck, and make it the only card that buys parts

If the cleanup is bigger than a weekend, that's what we do: https://adamtraywick.com/quickbooks-cleanup/

10/13/2026

The best time to ask your accountant about a truck is before you buy the truck.

That sounds obvious. It's also the part almost nobody does. The pattern we see every year: equipment in October, two new techs in November, bonus checks in December, and a phone call in February asking what it all means. By February, the answer is a history lesson.

A planning meeting in October is a different conversation. There's still time for the decisions to move. You can decide whether a purchase lands this year or next, whether your own pay is set up right, and how much to hold back for April, while the calendar still has room.

Here's what to bring:
1. Profit through September, reconciled, not estimated
2. Any equipment or vehicle purchases you're considering before year-end
3. Hiring plans for the next six months
4. What you've paid in estimated taxes so far this year
5. Anything that changed this year: a new location, a new partner, a big customer won or lost

Let's look at an example. Two HVAC owners have the same year. One sits down in October with that list and walks out with three decisions made. The other brings a shoebox in March. Same business, same rules, very different April.

Our full year-end checklist for DFW trades businesses: https://adamtraywick.com/year-end-tax-planning-checklist-for-dfw-trades-businesses/

10/08/2026

A year-end tax plan built on June's numbers is a guess with a spreadsheet attached.

October is when year-end planning actually starts, and the first question is always the same: what did the business make through September? For a lot of trades shops, nobody knows yet. The books are reconciled through spring, summer is a pile of receipts, and the bank feed has three months of uncategorized transactions.

That matters because every year-end decision runs on that number. Whether to buy the truck now or in January. How big the bonuses can be. Whether your last estimated payment needs to go up. Make those calls off stale books and you're planning for the business you ran six months ago.

Let's look at an example. An electrical contractor's books are current through May, and May was slow. Based on that, the plan says no equipment purchase this year and a normal January payment. Then the books get caught up in February. Summer was the best stretch the company ever had, and the tax bill shows it. Nothing about the plan was wrong except the numbers under it.

The fix isn't glamorous. Reconcile every bank and card account through September 30. Categorize what's sitting in the feed. Get a real year-to-date profit number. It usually takes less time than owners expect, and it's the only way the next three months of decisions mean anything.

If the books are too far behind to catch up yourself: https://adamtraywick.com/fort-worth-bookkeeping/

Adam Traywick CPA handles monthly bookkeeping for Fort Worth small businesses — clean books, clear reports, and a local team that keeps your numbers all year.

10/06/2026

Every maintenance agreement you sold this spring is a promise you haven't kept yet.

We like these agreements. They're some of the best revenue an HVAC shop can have: paid up front, predictable, and a reason for the customer to call you instead of whoever shows up first on Google. The trouble is how they show up in the books.

Most shops record the full payment as revenue the day it comes in. So spring looks fantastic. Then fall tune-ups roll around, the techs are out doing work that was paid for months ago, and the P&L says October was a bad month. It wasn't. October is just when the bill for April came due.

Let's look at an example. A shop sells 300 agreements in March and April, each covering a spring and a fall visit. Half the work is still owed in October. If the books say all of that money was earned in spring, the owner reads the fall numbers as a slump and starts cutting in the wrong places.

A cleaner way to see it: treat the unperformed visits as money you're holding, not money you've made, and let it move to revenue as the visits happen. How that should look on your books and your return depends on your situation.

Before fall tune-ups wrap, count how many visits you still owe and what they'll cost in tech hours. That's a real number, and the cash behind it is already spent.

Here's how we work with HVAC shops: https://adamtraywick.com/hvac-accountants/

Fort Worth CPA specialising in HVAC accounting — tax strategy, job costing, bookkeeping, and payroll for HVAC companies. Book yours firsr strategy call today.

10/01/2026

Your mileage log has a July problem, and Q4 is the last cheap time to fix it.

The IRS did something it almost never does this year. It changed the standard mileage rate in the middle of the year. Miles driven January through June are worth 72.5 cents each. Miles driven from July 1 on are worth 76 cents. Same truck, same route, different deduction depending on the date.

That breaks the way most trades owners keep the log. "14,000 business miles for the year" used to be enough. This year it isn't, because nobody can apply two rates to one total. The log has to show which side of June 30 each trip landed on.

Let's look at an example. An electrical contractor runs three vans between Fort Worth and job sites in Arlington and Denton all year. His app has every trip by date, so the split takes five minutes. His brother-in-law's HVAC shop keeps a running total on a whiteboard. That one gets rebuilt from fuel receipts in April, and rebuilt deductions have a way of shrinking.

If your app exports by date range, run it now. If it doesn't, start a fresh log today so at least the last quarter is clean.

Both rates from the IRS: https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/standard-mileage-rates

09/29/2026

An S-corp election you file this month won't touch this year's taxes. That's exactly why the fall is the right time to file it.

Here's how the timing works. To take effect on January 1, Form 2553 has to be in by mid-March of that year, or any time during the year before. File it in September and it starts clean on January 1: payroll from the first paycheck, one entity type for the whole year, no split-year return where part of your income shows up in one place and part in another.

A lot of HVAC owners first hear about the election in March, when the return is being prepared and the prior year is already locked. So they file for the current year, then scramble to set up payroll, back-fill reasonable compensation, and explain a January-to-March gap. It works, usually. It's just messier and more expensive than it needed to be.

Whether the election fits at all depends on your situation. It only pays off when there's real profit left after a fair salary for the work you do, and payroll plus a second return isn't free. Run your own numbers first: https://adamtraywick.com/s-corporation-tax-calculator/

Filing rules from the IRS: https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i2553

Full walkthrough on the blog: https://adamtraywick.com/s-corp-election-form-2553-guide/

09/24/2026

Your dispatcher decides your margin before the truck leaves the yard.

Busy and profitable are two different measurements. A plumbing company can be booked three weeks out, both trucks running, phone ringing all day, and finish the year at a net margin that wouldn't cover a good apprentice's raise. The number that explains it isn't on the P&L. It's inside individual jobs.

Let's look at an example. A customer calls with a clogged kitchen drain. The master plumber is closest, so he gets the call. Ninety minutes later the drain is clear and the ticket is a healthy-looking flat rate. Except his loaded cost per hour (wage plus payroll taxes, workers comp, insurance, drive time) is roughly double what an apprentice-and-journeyman team would've cost on the same drain. The job looked profitable. It was about half as profitable as it should've been.

Do that 20 times a month and your most expensive hours are going to your cheapest work.

Fixing it doesn't need new software. It needs each tech's loaded cost written somewhere the dispatcher can see it. Routing becomes a margin decision the moment someone assigns the truck.

Job costing done once a year is an autopsy. Done weekly, it's a checkup.

Full breakdown on the blog: https://adamtraywick.com/job-costing-for-plumbers-2026/

09/22/2026

A truck you order in December and pick up in January is a next-year deduction. The purchase date doesn't decide the tax year. The day it's ready for work does.

That one detail changes how the fall equipment conversation should go. Plenty of plumbing owners plan a year-end truck purchase to bring this year's tax bill down, sign in the last week of December, and then wait on delivery. The deduction moves with the truck.

The rules themselves are generous right now. Bonus depreciation is back at 100% for qualifying equipment acquired and placed in service after January 19, 2025, and Section 179 lets you expense qualifying purchases up to an annual cap the IRS sets. A service van, a jetter, a camera system, all can land in the year you put them to work, depending on your situation.

Let's look at an example. A plumbing shop needs a second van either way. Buying it in October instead of January means the write-off lands against this year's summer profit, and the van is on the road for the fall. Same van, different tax year, and timing was the only decision.

The truck still has to make business sense on its own. A deduction reduces taxable income. It doesn't pay for the truck.

Depreciation rules from the IRS: https://www.irs.gov/publications/p946

Full breakdown on the blog: https://adamtraywick.com/buying-a-truck-for-your-business-tax-write-off/

09/17/2026

The summer money is still in the account. This is the only time of year budgeting the winter is easy.

By January it's a rescue. By September it's arithmetic. You know what August looked like, you know what fixed costs run every month, and the slow stretch hasn't started eating anything yet.

Here's the pattern we see in DFW HVAC shops. The strong months get spent like they'll continue. Trucks, hires, a bigger yard. Then November arrives, install calls fall off, and the line of credit gets drawn to cover payroll. Repaid in June, drawn again in November. After a few years the line is carried year-round, and at that point it isn't smoothing cash flow. It's propping up a shop that's underfunded for its size.

Let's look at an example. Two shops book the same revenue. One sets aside three to six months of fixed costs during the summer peak and shifts maintenance work into October. The other keeps every dollar working. Guess which owner sleeps in January.

Three things to do before the cooling season is fully over: reconcile through August, write the shoulder-season budget, and decide now whether any equipment purchase happens this year or next.

Full breakdown on the blog: https://adamtraywick.com/how-to-plan-for-cash-flow-swings-in-hvac-business/