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Construction and the trades
It is the most common call we get from contractors. The year looks fine, the P&L says you made money, and there is nothing in the account. Usually the answer is not that the business is failing. It is that the books cannot tell you which jobs made money, how much of what you billed you have actually earned, and how much of your receivable is retainage that nobody owes you yet.
We cost every job properly, keep a work in progress schedule that shows where billing and completion have drifted apart, and track retainage as its own thing. Then you get a monthly call to go through it.
These are the ones we find in almost every file we take over.
Materials, subs and payroll all go to a single cost of goods sold line. You can see the company made twenty percent, but not that two jobs made thirty and one lost fifteen, so you keep bidding the losing kind of work.
Result: you cannot tell a good job from a bad one.
Bill ahead of the work and the month looks great, then the costs arrive later and it looks terrible. Bill behind and you have earned money the books do not show. Without a work in progress schedule, neither is visible.
Result: profit that moves for reasons nobody can explain.
Five or ten percent of every job sits held back until completion, sometimes far longer. In the books it usually looks like an ordinary receivable, so your aging report says you are owed money that nobody is late paying.
Result: a cash forecast that is quietly wrong.
What's included
Residential or commercial, from an owner with a crew of three to a company running several jobs at once.
Contractors doing roughly $500K to $10M a year, with jobs that run long enough that billing and completion do not line up on their own.
A work in progress schedule compares what a job has cost so far against what the whole job is expected to cost, works out how far along it really is, and compares that to how much you have billed.
The gap between those two is where contractors get surprised. Billed more than you have earned and the extra is not profit, it is money you owe in work. Earned more than you have billed and you are financing the customer without meaning to. Neither shows up anywhere on a standard P&L.
We update it every month and walk you through it on the call, so an overbilled job is something you know about while you can still plan around it rather than something you discover when the work runs out.
If your bonding agent or lender asks for a WIP schedule, this is what they want to see.
Three steps, and the first two cost you nothing.
What you build, how many jobs run at once, how you bill, and what you currently cannot answer about job profitability.
A flat monthly price in writing, plus a separate one-time fee if the job costing has to be rebuilt first.
Job structure set up, open jobs loaded with costs to date, then your first close with a WIP schedule in it.
Said up front, so nobody finds out in month three.
QuickBooks Online handles job costing well enough for most contractors up to a few million in revenue, provided it is set up properly. Most of the files we take over are not, which is usually the actual problem rather than the software.
You start needing a dedicated construction system when you have many concurrent jobs, complex progress billing, or equipment costing that has to be allocated by hour. We will tell you which side of that line you are on rather than selling you something.
It depends on your size, your contract lengths and your tax situation, and it is a decision to make with your CPA rather than one we make alone.
What we can tell you is that even contractors filing on a completed contract basis benefit from a WIP schedule internally. Knowing where a job stands is a management question before it is a tax one.
It gets its own account, separate from ordinary receivables, so your aging report shows what is genuinely late rather than mixing in money nobody owes you yet.
We track it both ways, what customers hold from you and what you hold from your subs, and we flag retainage that should have been released. On a lot of files, that is the first real cash we find.
No. Prevailing wage and certified payroll reporting for public works is a specialty with its own deadlines and its own filing systems, and doing it occasionally is how mistakes happen.
We run your regular payroll through Gusto and allocate it to jobs. If you take public works, we will happily work alongside whoever handles the certified side.
We collect W-9s before the first payment rather than chasing them in January, track insurance certificates and their expiry dates, and issue 1099s at year end.
The expiry tracking matters more than it sounds. A sub working on a lapsed certificate is a problem that lands on you, and it is the kind of thing bookkeeping is well placed to catch.
Yes. We review the file for free, then quote the rebuild as a separate one-time engagement so you can see what fixing the history costs against the monthly service.
How far back it is worth going depends on your open jobs. Sometimes the answer is to cost the open jobs properly, start clean going forward, and leave the closed ones alone.
Twenty minutes on the phone and you'll have a flat quote within a day.