Change orders never reach the numbers
Verbal approvals get built and never invoiced. We reconcile approved change orders against billed amounts each month so unbilled work surfaces while you can still collect on it.
General Contractors
Bookkeeping for General Contractors
You are the one holding the schedule, the subs, and the budget together. Your books should show whether that effort actually paid.
A general contractor's profit does not live in the company P&L. It lives in the gap between what a job was bid at and what it actually cost once the change orders, the extra trips, and the sub overruns landed. If those costs sit in one bucket, that gap is invisible until the job is closed and the money is gone.
We build your QuickBooks Online file around jobs and cost codes first: labor, materials, subcontractors, equipment, and other. Every bill, card charge, and payroll allocation lands on a job. From there, margin per project stops being a feeling and starts being a report.
What goes wrong
Where general contractors margin usually leaks.
Deposits spent before the work happens
Large upfront draws look like a great month and then the material bills arrive. Tracking deposits as customer liabilities until earned keeps the picture honest.
No WIP view across active jobs
With five jobs running you need to know which are overbilled and which are underbilled. A monthly WIP schedule shows costs to date, percent complete, and billing position side by side.
Sub invoices arriving out of sequence
A sub bills six weeks late and torpedoes a month that looked profitable. Accruing known sub costs to the right job and period keeps the margin where it belongs.
What we track for you
- Cost codes for labor, materials, subcontractors, equipment, and other
- Contract value, approved change orders, and total revised contract per job
- Billed to date vs. cost to date vs. estimate
- Retainage receivable on owner contracts and retainage payable to subs
- Subcontractor W-9 status and year-to-date payments for 1099-NEC
Your cost structure
- Labor
- Crew hours allocated to jobs with burden — payroll taxes, workers' comp, and benefits — so a job carries its true labor cost rather than base wages only.
- Subcontractors
- Every sub bill coded to job and cost code, with lien waiver and W-9 status tracked alongside so year-end 1099 prep is not a January scramble.
- Materials
- Supplier accounts split by job at entry, including restock credits and returns that otherwise quietly overstate cost.
- Overhead
- Trucks, insurance, office, and software kept out of direct job cost, then reported as a rate so you know what a job must carry before it earns.
What lands in your monthly report
- Profit and loss by job, with gross margin percent per project
- WIP schedule showing over/underbilling by job
- Aged receivables including retainage held
- Subcontractor payment summary with 1099 exposure to date
- Company profit and loss and balance sheet
General Contractors questions
See the full monthly plans and pricing, or read how the onboarding process works.
Related guides
Cash flow
Retainage: how to track money you have earned but cannot spend
Retainage is revenue you have earned, invoiced, and cannot use. Tracked in a normal receivables balance, it quietly ages into money nobody remembers to collect.
Reporting
The WIP schedule, explained for contractors who have to produce one
Banks and sureties ask for a WIP schedule. It is also the single most useful internal report a contractor with multiple active jobs can read.
Other trades we work with
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