Accounting for Construction & Contractors

Job costing means tracking every cost, materials, labor, subcontractors, equipment, against a specific job instead of lumping everything into one general expense pool. Without it, you can only tell whether the business as a whole made money, not which jobs did the work and which jobs quietly ate the profit. A contractor can close out a busy year and still not know that two of their biggest jobs actually lost money once real costs were allocated correctly. Job costing gives you that visibility while there's still time to act on it, not after the job is closed out.

Progress billing means invoicing a client for a portion of the contract as work is completed, rather than waiting until the entire job is finished to bill. It keeps cash flowing in alongside the costs you're incurring, instead of leaving you to front months of labor and materials before you see a payment. The tricky part is keeping your billing and your actual job costs aligned. If billing runs ahead of costs or vice versa, your books can make a job look more or less profitable than it actually is at any given moment, which is exactly what accurate work-in-progress tracking is meant to catch.

Yes. If your business pays subcontractors, keeping accurate records throughout the year, who was paid, how much, and for what, makes year-end 1099 filing straightforward instead of a January scramble to reconstruct a year of payments. We help set up subcontractor tracking as part of your regular bookkeeping so the information is already organized when filing season comes around.

Construction income rarely arrives evenly. A big job might close out in one quarter and leave the next one quiet, or weather might shut down work for weeks at a time. Tax planning that assumes steady, even income can leave you short on an estimated payment right when cash is tightest. We plan around your actual project and payment timing so estimated taxes and other obligations line up with when the cash is actually in the bank, not an assumption that doesn't match how construction income really flows.

WIP, work-in-progress, is a report that shows the status of every active job: contract value, costs incurred so far, billings to date, and estimated cost to complete. It's how you and anyone evaluating your business can see whether a job is on track, over budget, or overbilled relative to the actual progress. Lenders and bonding companies ask for it because it's one of the clearest pictures of a contracting business's real financial health, and an outdated or inaccurate WIP schedule can slow down or jeopardize financing you're counting on.

Yes, this is a common starting point. A lot of contractors come to us with materials, labor, and subcontractor costs all mixed together in one general ledger, with no way to tell which jobs were actually profitable. We can rebuild that structure going forward and, where the records allow it, reconstruct enough history to give you a clearer picture of past jobs too.

Yes. Whether you're on general accounting software or a construction-specific platform, we work with the data it produces and help make sure job costing, billing, and reporting are set up correctly within it. If you're not currently using a system built for job-level tracking, we can talk through whether one makes sense for your business.