Everything codes to one bucket
Materials, subs, fuel, and rentals all land in a couple of generic expense accounts. The P&L balances and still tells you nothing you can price a bid from.
Service
Contractor Bookkeeping
Monthly books that reflect how a construction business actually earns and spends money.
Most bookkeeping is built around a storefront: sales come in, expenses go out, and the month closes. A contracting business does not work that way. Money arrives as deposits, draws, and progress payments long before or long after the work happens, and costs land as material runs, sub invoices, equipment rentals, and crew hours spread across jobs that all overlap.
Crew Bookkeeping keeps your monthly books current inside your own QuickBooks Online file, with a chart of accounts and coding rules built for construction. The point is not a tidy file for its own sake — it is to end each month knowing what came in, what it cost, and where the margin actually landed.
The problem
What this usually looks like.
The books are two or three months behind
By the time the numbers are ready, the decision they should have informed has already been made. A late month is close to a missing month.
Business and personal are tangled
Owner draws, personal card charges, and truck payments blur together, which distorts the margin picture and makes year-end handoff painful.
Deposits treated as profit
A large upfront draw makes a month look excellent, and then the material bills arrive. Timing matters as much as the totals.
What Crew Bookkeeping does
Reconcile every account, every month
Bank accounts, credit cards, and loan accounts reconciled on a set schedule so the balances in QuickBooks match reality.
Code transactions the way a builder reads them
Cost of goods sold split into labor, materials, subcontractors, equipment, and other — separate from overhead — so gross margin means something.
Keep vendor bills organized
Supplier and rental bills entered and matched to payments so you can see what is owed rather than guessing from the bank balance.
Deliver statements you can use
Profit and loss, balance sheet, and a plain-language note on what changed and what needs your attention, at the cadence in your plan.
Who it's for
- Contractors and trade businesses up to roughly $3M in annual revenue
- Owners who are the estimator, the scheduler, and the bookkeeper of last resort
- Businesses on QuickBooks Online, or ready to move onto it
- Anyone whose tax preparer has asked for cleaner books
What you get
- Monthly bank and credit card reconciliations
- Construction-specific chart of accounts
- Vendor and materials bill organization
- Profit and loss and balance sheet at your plan's cadence
- A clear year-end handoff package for your tax preparer
Trades that use this most
Related guides
Job costing
Job costing for contractors: what it is and how to set it up
Company-level profit tells you almost nothing about which jobs earned it. Here is the cost code structure and setup sequence that makes job margin visible.
Cash flow
Cash flow for contractors: why a full pipeline doesn't mean money in the bank
Profit is an opinion about a period of time. Cash is a fact about today. Here is why the two diverge on construction jobs, and what actually shortens the gap.
Find out what your jobs are really earning.
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