Which industries does PSC advise?

Why the industry matters at all

The fundamentals do not change. Accurate books, a structure that fits, knowing where cash is going, planning the tax side, thinking about growth before it arrives — that list is the same for a roofing company and a design studio.

What changes is how those fundamentals have to be applied. Where the money arrives from and when. What counts as a cost of doing the work rather than a cost of being open. What the statements have to be able to prove. Getting that wrong does not produce obviously broken books; it produces books that look fine and cannot answer the question you actually have.

What changes by industry is the shape of the numbers. What has to be true underneath does not.

Construction and contracting

The defining question is whether a job made money, and it is not answerable from an annual total. A good year can hide half the jobs carrying the other half.

That means coding costs to the job as they happen rather than sorting it out afterwards — set up once, and then it simply runs. Around it sit the things particular to building: money held back until completion, equipment written off over time rather than at once, and the registration rules a contractor has to keep current, which are a Rhode Island question as much as a federal one.

Food service

High transaction volume, thin margins, and tax on what is sold that has to be collected and handed over correctly. Tips have their own reporting. Food cost moves weekly and takes the margin with it.

The pattern that catches restaurants is the gap between when costs are incurred and when the money for them arrives. A place can trade profitably for a year and still be short in a given week, which is why the cash position matters more here than the annual figure does.

Hospitality and events

Revenue arrives in lumps, around the events, with quieter stretches between. Planning against a smooth monthly assumption does not survive contact with that.

The work is mostly about the unevenness: seeing the quiet months before they arrive, holding back enough from the busy ones, and shaping the costs around the pattern rather than against it.

Media and production

Project-based revenue, which behaves like construction more than it looks like it — the useful question is whether the project paid, not whether the year did.

Around that sit two things that need settling early. Who owns the work that was made, which is a question about contracts before it is a question about accounting. And the mix of employed and contracted people, which has to be classified correctly the first time, because putting it right afterwards is expensive.

Professional services

Consultants, designers, and firms selling their own time. The numbers are simpler and the pressure points are specific: how work is billed, how long the money takes to arrive, how overhead is allocated across the work, and the decision about when to hire rather than subcontract.

The recurring trap is a full order book and no cash, because everything is invoiced and nothing has been collected. That is a receivables problem wearing a growth costume.

What carries across all of them

The same things, every time. Books that describe reality. A structure that fits the business as it is now. Knowing where the cash is going before it has gone. Planning the tax side while the year is still open. And a rhythm of looking, so that nothing is discovered at the end.

PSC has been doing this since 1996. The breadth is not a strategy — it is the result of answering what people in the community actually needed, and the practical benefit of it is that most of what goes wrong in a given trade has gone wrong here before.