INDUSTRIES / CONSTRUCTION CONTRACTORS
Construction contractorsKnow your margin per job,
not per year
Most contractors find out whether a job made money long after the crew has moved on. By then the next three bids have already been priced off a feeling. Proper job costing changes that, and it is the single biggest thing missing from most contractors' books.
Accurate books that still
can't tell you anything
A contractor's books can balance perfectly and still be useless. If every cost lands in one bucket called "materials" and one called "labor," your P&L tells you the company made money last quarter. It will never tell you that the school gym job carried the whole quarter while two residential builds quietly lost twelve thousand dollars each.
That's the difference between recording history and running a business. Contractors don't have one business, they have a portfolio of small ones, and each job needs its own scoreboard.
Then there's the timing problem. Construction revenue rarely matches construction cash. You bill on a schedule, costs land when they land, retainage sits with the customer for months after the work is finished. A cash-basis view of a percentage-of-completion business is a distorted picture, and it's the reason so many contractors feel busy and broke at the same time.
Under-billing is the version nobody notices. You've done $180,000 of work and billed $140,000, so you're effectively lending the customer $40,000 at zero interest while paying suppliers on thirty-day terms. A WIP schedule surfaces that in a fortnight. Without one, you find out when payroll is tight.
What usually goes wrong
- Costs pooled company-wide instead of by job
- No work-in-progress schedule, so over- and under-billing goes unseen
- Retainage recorded as revenue or forgotten entirely
- Change orders done on a handshake and never invoiced
- Subcontractors misclassified, creating 1099 and audit exposure
- Equipment expensed in full instead of depreciated properly
- Books that can't produce what a bonding agent or bank asks for
Bookkeeping from $299/month · Cleanup from $200 per month behind
Construction accounting,
done the way the trade works
These aren't add-ons. They're the standard shape of the work for a contractor, and the reason a generalist bookkeeper struggles.
Job costing
Every dollar of labor, material, equipment and sub cost tagged to the job it belongs to. Real margin per job, visible while the job is still running.
WIP schedules
Percentage of completion, earned revenue, and over- and under-billing calculated monthly. The report your bonding agent and your bank both ask for.
Retainage tracking
Held amounts recorded as receivable, aged, and chased. You'll know exactly what's outstanding and how long it's been sitting there.
Change orders
Tracked from approval through to invoice, so work that got added to the scope actually gets added to the bill.
Certified & union payroll
Prevailing wage, fringe reporting and union remittances handled for public and Davis-Bacon work.
Equipment & assets
Depreciation schedules, hourly equipment cost rates and fixed asset registers kept current for tax and for bidding.
You'll recognise this if...
None of these mean anything is broken. They mean the books were set up to satisfy a tax return rather than to run a business, which is the normal starting point.
You bid off feel
You price the next job from experience rather than from what the last three like it actually returned.
Retainage is a mystery
You know money is being held somewhere but couldn't say how much or by whom without ringing round.
The bank asked for a WIP
Someone requested a work-in-progress schedule and it took a week and a spreadsheet to produce something approximate.
Good year, no cash
The P&L says the year went well and the bank account disagrees, and nobody can explain the gap.
What it looks like
three months in
By the second month you'll have a job cost report you actually read. Not a spreadsheet somebody maintains reluctantly — a monthly view showing which jobs are tracking to estimate, which are slipping, and by how much.
By month three you'll have enough history to bid differently. Most contractors discover the same two things: one category of work is far less profitable than they assumed, and one crew or foreman consistently comes in under estimate. Both are worth knowing before the next bidding season.
You'll also have a WIP schedule you can hand to a bonding agent or a lender without a week of scrambling. That alone has widened the jobs some of our clients can go after.
And you'll stop being surprised in April. Tax planning happens during the year — equipment timing, entity structure, how you pay yourself — so the bill is something you saw coming rather than something that happened to you.
BOOK A FREE CALLEvery client gets
- Replies within 48 hours, guaranteed
- Books closed by the 15th, every month
- Flat monthly pricing, no hourly billing
- A plain-English summary with every report
- The same team every single month
- Cancel any time, files handed over cleanly
Construction accounting questions
We work alongside the common ones — Procore, Buildertrend, CoConstruct, Sage — with QuickBooks Online as the accounting system of record. If your project management tool doesn't export cleanly, we'll tell you on the call rather than discovering it a month in.
Yes. We produce monthly WIP schedules showing costs to date, estimated cost to complete, earned revenue and billing position. It's the standard requirement for bonded work and for most bank facilities above a certain size.
Handled, including prevailing wage rates, fringe benefit reporting and the weekly certified payroll reports Davis-Bacon work requires. We'll also flag classification issues before they become a problem.
Possibly, and it's worth reviewing. The IRS and most state labor departments apply control tests that a lot of contractors would fail if examined. We'll review your arrangements and tell you honestly where the exposure sits — that's a cheaper conversation than the alternative.
No, and it's more common than you'd think in a busy year. Catch-up work is a separate one-time project at $200 per month behind, quoted before we start, and most cases finish in two to four weeks.
Yes, and it's often more revealing than tracking by job type. Consistent variance between one foreman's jobs and another's usually points at estimating, scheduling or supervision, and it's much easier to fix once you can see it in numbers.
Find out what your jobs
are actually making
Thirty minutes, no pitch. We'll look at your current books, show you what job costing would reveal that you can't see today, and quote a flat monthly price.
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