Construction accounting and bookkeeping services

Job costing that actually holds up

Job costing fails for boring reasons. Cost codes get invented on the fly, payroll goes in as one lump, equipment time never gets allocated, and within two quarters nobody trusts the job reports enough to open them.

We build a cost code structure once — labor, material, subcontractor, equipment, and other, applied consistently across every job — and then enforce it at entry. Every bill, every payroll run, every credit card charge gets coded to a job and a cost code before it hits the ledger.

• Standard five-bucket cost code structure applied across all jobs
• Payroll allocated to jobs with burden loaded, not raw wages
• Committed costs from open POs and subcontracts shown against budget
• Change orders tracked against original contract value
• Estimate versus actual by cost code, refreshed at every close

Retainage on both sides of the ledger

Retainage held on your receivables and retainage you hold back from subs are two separate balances, and QuickBooks Online tracks neither by default. Most contractor files we inherit have retainage buried inside regular AR and AP, which overstates what is collectible in 30 days and understates what you owe at close-out.

We split retainage into its own receivable and payable accounts so your aging reports reflect real, near-term cash and your sub payouts at completion are never a surprise.

Sales tax and state compliance — where contractors get burned

Almost every state treats construction differently depending on what you are and what you are building. Prime contractors on private work often collect sales tax on the full contract including labor. Subcontractors to a prime generally do not, provided the resale or exemption certificate is on file. Spec building is frequently a use tax situation. Public work can sit under its own classification entirely.

The details change state to state — Washington's combined excise return works differently from a destination-based sales tax state — but the trap is the same: miscoding across these categories is the most common finding in a state revenue audit, and it compounds quietly for years. We set the tax coding correctly at the item and customer level for the states you work in, reconcile every filing to the general ledger, and keep exemption certificates documented.

• Correct sales tax treatment for prime, sub, spec, and public work
• State-by-state classification by activity, not one blanket rule
• Resale and exemption certificate collection and expiry tracking
• Every state filing reconciled to the GL each period

Your software stack, and where it breaks

We work in QuickBooks Online alongside Buildertrend, Jobtread, Jobber, Knowify, and Hubdoc. Each integration has known failure points, and knowing them in advance is most of the job.

Buildertrend's QBO sync, for example, does not carry sales tax correctly on invoices, which quietly understates what you owe the state. We reconcile the two systems monthly rather than trusting the sync.

• QuickBooks Online set up for job costing from the chart of accounts up
• Buildertrend, Jobtread, Jobber, and Knowify reconciled to QBO monthly
• QuickBooks Desktop to Online migration on a fixed fee, history preserved
• Receipt capture and AP approval workflow so coding happens once