Accounting for contractors and construction
Job-level numbers, payroll that handles crews, and planning around the big equipment decisions.
Most contractors know whether the year was good. Far fewer can say which jobs made it good. That's the gap we close.
Construction accounting is unusual because the money and the work don't line up in time. You buy materials in March, bill a draw in April, get paid in June, and hold retainage until the thing is finished. Meanwhile payroll runs every week regardless. A P&L that ignores all of that will tell you you're profitable in a month you actually lost ground.
So we build the books around jobs, not just months. When each project carries its own costs — labor, materials, subs, equipment — you can see which kinds of work are worth bidding and which ones quietly eat the margin.
The real issue
Where contractors lose money without noticing
It's rarely one disaster. It's a bid that was light on labor, a change order nobody wrote down, and a piece of equipment financed in a year when it didn't help. Each is small. Together they're the difference between a good year and a flat one.
Catching that pattern requires cost data at the job level and someone looking at it before the job is closed out. That's ordinary bookkeeping discipline, not anything exotic — but it has to actually happen.
What we handle
- Job costing so you can see profit by project, not just by month
- Payroll for crews, including multi-rate and overtime situations
- Subcontractor tracking and year-end 1099 preparation
- Cash-flow planning across draw schedules and retainage
- Timing conversations on equipment and vehicle purchases — before you sign
- Financial statements clean enough for bonding and lender requests
FAQ
Questions we hear
That's the point of job costing, and yes. Once costs are coded to jobs, you get profitability by project instead of one blended number. Most owners find at least one type of work they'd been underbidding.
It mainly means staying on top of documentation through the year so January isn't a scramble to collect information for 1099s. We track it as we go rather than reconstructing it later.
Sometimes yes, sometimes it's the wrong year for it. It depends on your income, what you've already bought, and what next year looks like. That's a conversation to have in October — not on December 30th, which is when we usually get the call.
Know your numbers before the job closes
Book a consultation and we'll talk about getting job-level visibility into your books.