Other Services Chart of Accounts: Track Parts Cost, Labor, and Tips

If you run a repair shop, salon, dry cleaner, or pet grooming business, your QuickBooks probably has one revenue account for "Sales" and one expense account that swallows everything from replacement parts to shampoo to a new pair of clippers. That setup can tell you whether you made money last month. It can't tell you whether a given job was profitable, or whether the price you're charging actually covers what the job costs you.

This guide walks through a chart of accounts built for the "Other Services" category — repair, personal care, dry cleaning, and pet care businesses — that separates the things that actually drive your margin.

Why Service Businesses Need More Than One Revenue and Cost Line

These businesses share a structure that a generic chart of accounts doesn't account for:

• Parts and materials are a real cost of the job, not overhead — a replacement part, a bottle of hair color, or a tin of dry cleaning solvent is consumed by a specific service, the same way a manufacturer consumes raw materials.
• Labor is usually the biggest cost, and it's tied to a specific service line — a technician, a stylist, and a groomer are different skill sets with different pay rates and different revenue they generate.
• Revenue comes from several different service lines that behave nothing alike — a repair job is priced per job with parts marked up, a salon service is priced mostly for the stylist's time, and a grooming appointment sits somewhere in between.
• Tools and equipment aren't the same as supplies — a diagnostic scanner or a styling chair is a piece of equipment you'll use for years; a bottle of shampoo or a box of gloves is consumed in weeks.

Lumping all of that into one "Cost of Goods Sold" line and one "Expenses" line hides exactly the numbers you'd want to look at before raising prices or adding a service.

Setting Up the Account Structure

Here are the accounts that make this distinction possible, pulled from the actual Other Services template:

Notice the split: everything in the 5000 range is a direct cost of delivering a specific service, and it sits in cost of goods sold. Equipment upkeep, by contrast, is an operating expense — it keeps the business running, but it isn't consumed by any one job.

Parts and Materials: Inventory Until They're Used

A part sitting on your shelf and a part installed in a customer's appliance are not the same thing from an accounting standpoint. Under GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles), a cost only becomes an expense when it's matched to the revenue it helped generate — the matching principle. Until then, it's an asset.

That's why the template carries Parts Inventory (1300) as a current asset and Parts & Components (5100) as a separate cost of goods sold account. When you buy a case of replacement parts, the cost sits in inventory. When a technician installs one on a job, the cost of that part moves into Parts & Components and gets matched against the Repair Services Revenue it helped produce. The same logic applies to Beauty & Spa Supplies (5120) and Cleaning Chemicals & Supplies — a salon buys color in bulk, but only the amount used in a given appointment is a cost of that appointment.

This matters for pricing. If you're pricing a repair job by adding a flat markup to the part, you need to know the actual cost of the part that left inventory — not an average of everything on the shelf.

Splitting Direct Labor by Service Line

Repair, salon, and pet care work are priced differently. A repair job is usually billed per job — labor plus marked-up parts. A salon service is billed mostly for time and skill, with materials a small fraction of the price. A grooming appointment often blends both.

Because the pricing logic is different, the template keeps labor separate by service line: Direct Labor - Technicians (5000), Direct Labor - Stylists (5010), and Direct Labor - Groomers (5020) each sit in cost of goods sold on their own line. That split lets you calculate a labor cost percentage for each service line instead of one blended number that hides which line is actually carrying the business.

Service Tips (4500) and Tips Paid Out (5040) follow the same logic used in any tipped-service business: tips collected are revenue passed through to the provider, and the payout is a direct labor cost, not overhead.

How This Gets Booked: Two Examples

A repair job. A customer brings in a washing machine. The technician diagnoses a failed pump, orders the part from stock, and installs it. The part's cost moves out of Parts Inventory (1300) and into Parts & Components (5100). The technician's hours for the job post to Direct Labor - Technicians (5000). The invoice — labor plus marked-up part — posts to Repair Services Revenue (4000). Subtracting 5000 and 5100 from 4000 for that job tells you whether the markup on the part and the hours billed actually covered the cost of doing the work.

A color and cut appointment. A stylist uses color product from stock during the service. That product cost posts to Beauty & Spa Supplies (5120), and the stylist's time posts to Direct Labor - Stylists (5010). The client tips in cash and on the card. The card tip posts to Service Tips (4500) as a liability until it's paid out, and the payout posts to Tips Paid Out (5040). If the client also buys a bottle of the shampoo used, that sale posts to Product Sales (4400), and its cost posts to Cost of Products Sold (5300) — a separate line from the service itself, because retail product margin and service margin run at very different rates.

Equipment and Tools: Capitalize the Big Stuff, Expense the Rest

Not everything you buy for the shop is a cost of a specific job. A diagnostic scanner, a styling chair, or a grooming table is a piece of equipment you'll use across hundreds of future jobs — under GAAP, that's a fixed asset you capitalize and depreciate over its useful life, not an expense you take all at once. That's what Shop Tools & Equipment (1500), Salon & Spa Equipment (1510), and Pet Care Equipment (1530) are for, paired with Depreciation Expense (6800) to spread the cost over time.

Keeping upkeep on those assets — Equipment Repairs & Maintenance (6300) — in operating expenses rather than cost of goods sold matters too. A repair to the shop's own equipment isn't a cost of any one customer's job; it's overhead that benefits every job you do with that machine. Low-cost consumables like clippers or hand tools that don't meet your capitalization threshold belong in Small Tools & Supplies (6310) as a straightforward operating expense instead.

Get Started

Our other services chart of accounts template has these accounts — and the rest of the structure for repair, salon, dry cleaning, and pet care businesses — pre-configured and ready to import into QuickBooks. It takes 60 seconds to optimize and gives you the reporting structure your business needs.

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