Construction & Contractors
Every project is its own profit center. We track labor, materials, and subs by the job so you know exactly which work makes money and which doesn't.
The Industry
Construction accounting is different from almost every other business. You don’t just need to know if the company made money last month. You need to know if each individual project made money. Every job has its own materials, its own labor costs, its own subs, and its own margin. A general P&L tells you almost nothing useful.
The cash flow timing makes it harder. You’re buying materials and paying crews before the draw comes through. On commercial work, pay applications can take 60 or 90 days to process. On residential jobs, you might be waiting on a homeowner’s financing. Meanwhile, the supply house wants its money and your guys expect their checks on Friday. There is a constant gap between spending and collecting, and managing that gap is half the battle.
Who This Covers
Who This Covers
General contractors, home builders, remodelers, and commercial construction companies in Phoenix and the Valley. Anyone who bids work, buys materials, manages subs, and invoices on completion or by draw schedule.
The Friction
The Friction
You know roughly whether a job went well or not. But “roughly” is the problem. Without detailed tracking at the project level, profitable jobs quietly subsidize the losing ones. You never see the pattern clearly enough to fix your pricing.
What We Handle
Job costing is the foundation of everything we do for construction clients. Every material receipt, every labor hour, and every subcontractor invoice gets tagged to the correct project. We build out your chart of accounts and tracking structure in QuickBooks so you can see profitability by job, not just for the company as a whole. This is not a generic bookkeeping setup with a single “Materials” expense line. It is a project-level view of where your money actually goes.
We also manage the compliance work that piles up when you’re busy running crews. W-9 collection from subs, certificates of insurance on file before the first check goes out, and 1099 filings handled at year end. Arizona’s transaction privilege tax has specific rules for contractors, and we make sure the right amounts get reported to the right jurisdictions without you having to think about it.
Job Profitability
Job Profitability
You see what each project actually earned after all costs are accounted for. Not what you thought it earned based on the contract price, but the real margin after materials, labor, subs, and the overhead allocation. This is the data that makes your next bid more accurate.
Subcontractor Management
Subcontractor Management
We track your subs from the first payment forward. W-9s collected upfront, insurance certificates verified, and payments logged by project. When January rolls around, 1099 filing is a routine task instead of a week-long scavenger hunt for missing paperwork.
Common Problems
The most dangerous pattern in construction is mixing project cash. A deposit comes in for the new job and immediately gets used to finish the old one. It works for a while. Then two or three projects overlap, the draws don’t line up with expenses, the bank account drops, and nobody can explain exactly why. Without project-level financial tracking, you can be technically busy and functionally broke at the same time.
The other trap is bidding without real cost data. You price the next kitchen remodel based on gut feel and a rough material estimate. But you forgot to account for the callback on the last one, the extra dump run, and the two days your crew lost to weather. Those costs are real. If they don’t show up in your bid, they come straight out of your profit.
Overhead Gets Buried
Overhead Gets Buried
Lumber and labor are easy to count. Vehicle insurance, fuel, tool replacement, licensing fees, office costs, and your own time are harder to quantify. If those numbers aren’t built into every estimate, you are working for less than you think on every single job.
Change Orders Disappear
Change Orders Disappear
The homeowner asks to upgrade the tile or move a wall. You agree on the spot because you’re standing right there. It never gets documented. It never gets invoiced. Over the course of a year, those untracked change orders add up to thousands of dollars you earned but never collected.
What Changes
You start making decisions based on actual numbers instead of instinct. When you can pull up the cost data from your last five remodels or your last three commercial projects, you know what to charge for the next one. Your estimates stop being guesses and start being grounded in real job history. That confidence changes how you bid and which jobs you choose to take on.
Cash flow becomes something you can plan around instead of react to. You see the draw schedule, the outstanding invoices, and the bills coming due in one clear picture. When it’s time to apply for a line of credit, finance equipment, or pursue bonding for a larger project, your financial statements are already clean and ready to hand over.
Better Bids
Better Bids
Your pricing is built on real cost data from completed work. You know your true cost per square foot on framing. You know what plumbing subs actually run on a two-bath remodel. You stop leaving money on the table and stop accidentally underbidding the hard jobs.
Room to Grow
Room to Grow
Scaling a construction company without knowing your numbers is how contractors go under. With clean books and job-level reporting, you know exactly how much overhead another crew adds, what revenue you need to cover it, and when it makes sense to take that next step.
Your Valley of the Sun Bookkeeper
The Next Step:
A Quick Conversation
Tell us what's going on with your books. We'll listen, ask a few questions, and give you a clear quote with no surprises.
