Start with separate accounts. A dedicated business checking account and credit card keep personal and business spending apart. This sounds basic but it solves most tracking problems before they start. When every business transaction flows through business accounts, you have a clean record without sorting through personal purchases.

Capture receipts the same day. Supply house runs for wire, breakers, and outlets add up fast. So do the hardware store trips for connectors, tape, and miscellaneous materials. Use an app like Dext, Hubdoc, or even your phone’s camera to snap photos of receipts before they fade or get lost in your truck. Paper receipts from electrical suppliers often print on thermal paper that becomes unreadable within months.

Set up expense categories that match how electricians actually spend money. Materials and supplies cover wire, conduit, boxes, breakers, outlets, and all the consumables that go into jobs. Tools and equipment include meters, drills, fish tapes, and anything you use across multiple projects. Vehicle expenses track fuel, maintenance, and repairs on your work truck. Licensing fees, continuing education, and insurance premiums each deserve their own category too.

If you’re running larger projects or working as a subcontractor on commercial jobs, track expenses by job. This lets you see actual profitability on each project instead of just your overall numbers. When a general contractor asks for a breakdown or you’re bidding similar work next year, you have real data to work from.

Vehicle tracking requires extra attention. Electricians put serious miles on their trucks driving between job sites, supply runs, and inspections. You can deduct actual vehicle expenses or take the standard mileage rate, but either way you need documentation. A mileage tracking app that runs in the background makes this automatic instead of trying to reconstruct trips at year end.

Reconcile your accounts monthly. This means matching your bank and credit card statements against your bookkeeping records to catch errors, duplicate charges, and missed expenses. A transaction from three months ago is hard to remember. A transaction from last week is still fresh.

The pattern that works is daily receipt capture, weekly expense categorization, and monthly reconciliation. Fifteen minutes a day during the week keeps everything current. Waiting until tax season to organize a year of expenses turns a manageable task into a painful project where you miss deductions simply because you can’t remember what a charge was for.

Many construction and trades businesses eventually hand off bookkeeping because the tracking discipline competes with billable work. Whether you do it yourself or work with someone, the system matters more than who runs it. Clean expense records mean your tax preparer can identify every deduction you’re entitled to instead of making conservative guesses about unclear transactions.

The goal is arriving at tax time with categorized expenses, documented mileage, and receipts that support everything. That’s how you capture every deduction and avoid the stress of reconstructing a year of business activity from bank statements alone.