Bookkeeping for contractors.
You can finish a profitable job and still be short on payroll Friday. That's not bad luck and it's not bad math — it's retainage, progress billing, and underbilling, and none of them show up on a normal profit and loss.
Books built the way construction actually works. From $375 a month.
Job costing · WIP · Certified payroll · Closed by the 15th
Illustrative, and the shape of it is why profitable contractors miss payroll. Every dollar is real work you've already done.
A contractor's books have three problems a retailer's never will.
Most bookkeepers are perfectly good and have simply never worked a job with retainage on it. That's the whole difference.
Money you earned but can't touch
Five to ten percent held back until final completion. On a $200,000 job that's $10,000 to $20,000 sitting somewhere else while you're paying the crew who earned it. It has to be tracked as its own thing, not buried in receivables.
Billing that lags the work
You front materials and labour, then bill on a draw schedule somebody else set. Underbill by accident and you've financed the job yourself without deciding to.
Company-wide numbers hide the loser
A 12% margin across the year can be four good jobs and one that ate the profit. Without job-level costing you never learn which, so you keep bidding the same way.
Set up the way the trade works.
Not a generic chart of accounts with your company name on it. Labour, materials, subs, equipment, and permits broken out per job — so at the end of a job you know what it made, not what the whole company made.
Everything in the standard plans, plus the parts only a contractor needs.
A WIP schedule, kept current.
Work in progress is the first document a bonding agent or a commercial lender asks for, and the first thing most contractors can't produce quickly. It shows which jobs you've overbilled and which you've underbilled — which is the same as showing whether you're financing your customers.
Kept current every month, it turns a bonding conversation from a scramble into a formality. And it tells you where cash is going before the bank does.
Trades running crews, not one-man operations.
A good fit if
- You run crews — general, electrical, mechanical, concrete, framing, roofing, excavation
- You've got somewhere between 1 and 100 people
- Jobs run weeks or months, not hours
- You've had a profitable month and a tight payroll in the same month
- Your banker or bonding agent has asked for something you couldn't produce fast
Probably not yet if
- You're a one-man operation doing same-day work with no crew
- Every job is invoiced and paid inside a week
- You want tax returns filed — that's your CPA's job
- You'd rather nobody asked which jobs lost money
Which of last year's jobs actually made money?
If that answer takes more than a minute to find, that's the conversation. Twenty minutes on the phone and you'll know what it would take to fix it.
Straight answers.
Why can a profitable job leave me short on cash?
Because profit and cash aren't the same thing and construction separates them further than most trades. Retainage holds back 5–10% until final completion. You front materials and labour before the first draw. Change orders get worked before they're billed. All three are real money you've earned and can't spend, and none of them show up as a problem on a standard profit and loss.
Do you do certified payroll?
Yes, for prevailing wage work. That means the weekly reports those jobs require, filed on schedule. Payroll itself runs on a real platform — QuickBooks Payroll, ADP, or whatever you're on — so the licensed system handles withholding and deposits, and Boldr operates it and reconciles it into your books.
What's a WIP schedule and do I need one?
Work in progress shows, job by job, how much you've billed against how much work you've actually completed. If you've billed more than you've earned you're overbilled; less and you're financing the job. It's the first document a bonding agent or commercial lender asks for, and if you want bonding capacity you need it kept current, not assembled in a panic.
My books are a mess from last year.
Normal, and specifically normal in construction where the paperwork multiplies per job. Catch-up is a separate one-time project at $65 an hour with a range quoted before anything starts. Then you're current and on a monthly close.
Do I have to change software?
QuickBooks Online is the standard here and what most contractors are already on. If you're running something else, bring it up on the call — most of the time it works, and where it doesn't you'd get told plainly rather than sold a migration you don't need.
Are you local?
West Michigan is home ground, so on-site work happens across Kent, Ottawa, Muskegon and Allegan counties. Bookkeeping itself is remote work and runs the same for a contractor anywhere in the country.