Bookkeeping for Concrete Contractors
You bid a foundation job in November based on a price per yard that made the margin work. By the time you pour in March, the ready-mix price has gone up $8 a yard. Multiply that across 600 yards and your margin just shrunk by nearly five grand on one job.
Concrete contractors deal with material cost swings that can turn a profitable bid into a break-even project between the time you submit and the time you pour. Your books need to track those cost movements in real time, not surface them three months after the job is done.
Bookkeeping for Drywall & Painting Contractors
Drywall and painting work runs on tight margins and high labor ratios. Your material costs are relatively predictable. What kills your margin is labor: callbacks for touch-ups, crews that drag on finish work, punch lists that take twice as long as they should. If your books don’t separate those labor costs by phase, every completed job looks the same on paper even though some of them quietly lost money.
What Drywall & Painting Contractors Need From Their Books
Labor-to-material ratio tracking. In drywall and painting, labor is the dominant cost. We track your labor-to-material ratio by job so you can see when labor costs are running higher than expected relative to the scope. A ratio that’s out of line on a specific job is an early warning sign.
Bookkeeping for Electrical Contractors
You bid a job at 18% margin. Rough-in went fine. Then trim dragged out because the GC changed the fixture spec twice, your material costs jumped, and your apprentice took longer on the panel than you estimated. When the job closed, your actual margin was 9%. Maybe less. You’re not entirely sure because your books don’t track costs at the phase level.
If that sounds familiar, your bookkeeping isn’t set up for electrical work.
Bookkeeping for Excavation & Sitework Contractors
Your biggest expense isn’t labor. It’s iron. Excavators, dozers, loaders, haul trucks, trailers. Between payments, fuel, maintenance, and insurance, your equipment line can make or break your year. And most bookkeepers don’t know how to allocate those costs to the jobs that actually use them.
The result? Your P&L says you’re profitable, but you have no idea whether that $400K site development job covered its equipment costs or just looked good because the dozer payment hit a different line item.
Bookkeeping for Fire Protection Contractors
Fire protection is one of the most specialized trades in construction, and the financial side is just as specialized. You’ve got new construction installation work with long project timelines and retainage. You’ve got recurring inspection and maintenance contracts generating steady monthly revenue. You’ve probably got prevailing wage obligations on public projects. And the compliance documentation requirements are heavier than most trades.
A general bookkeeper isn’t going to know what to do with any of that.
Bookkeeping for Framing Contractors
Framing is one of the most labor-intensive trades in construction. Your margins live and die on crew productivity. A crew that frames a floor a day makes you money. A crew that takes a day and a half on the same scope just ate your profit. But if your books don’t track labor at the job level, you’ll never see the difference until it’s too late.
What Framing Contractors Need From Their Books
Labor burden as the primary cost driver. In framing, labor is typically 50-65% of your total job cost. That makes it the single biggest lever on your profitability. We track labor costs per job, per phase, and per crew so you can see exactly where your labor dollars are going and where productivity is slipping.
Bookkeeping for HVAC & Mechanical Contractors
January is slow. Your crews are doing maintenance callbacks and a few replacement jobs. Then April hits, and suddenly you’re slammed with install work, retrofit projects, and every commercial PM call you deferred through the winter. By July, you’re running seven days a week and the money is flowing in.
Then October comes and the cycle starts over.
HVAC contractors live on a cash flow roller coaster that most bookkeepers don’t account for. Your books need to handle the peaks and valleys without making February look like a crisis and August look like you’re printing money.
Bookkeeping for Plumbing Contractors
You’re running service calls all morning, roughing in a new build in the afternoon, and dealing with a warranty callback from last month’s water heater install before you head home. Three completely different revenue streams, three different margin profiles, and most plumbing contractors track them all in one undifferentiated bucket.
That makes it nearly impossible to know which side of your business is actually making money.
What Plumbing Contractors Need From Their Books
Plumbing businesses are uniquely complex because most shops run both service and construction work simultaneously. The financial dynamics of dispatching a tech on a $300 service call are nothing like the dynamics of a $200K rough-in on a new apartment building. Your books need to reflect that.
Bookkeeping for Roofing Contractors
Roofing is a volume business with thin margins and a lot of moving parts. You might close 30 jobs in a month between insurance restoration work, new construction, and re-roofs. Each one has a different billing structure, a different material package, and a different crew cost. If your books treat them all the same, you’re flying blind on which side of the business is actually paying the bills.
What Roofing Contractors Need From Their Books
Insurance restoration billing management. If storm work is a significant part of your revenue, the billing cycle is unlike any other trade. Supplements, depreciation recoverable, deductible collection, insurance carrier negotiation. We track each claim as a job with its own revenue and cost structure so you can see the true profit on restoration work after supplements, not just the initial scope.
Bookkeeping for Steel Erection Contractors
Steel erection is high-stakes work. Big crews, heavy equipment, expensive materials, and insurance costs that would make most trades flinch. A single crane rental can run more than most contractors spend on materials for an entire job. And if your books don’t separate fabrication costs from erection costs from equipment costs, you’ll never know the true margin on the work you’re putting up.
What Steel Erection Contractors Need From Their Books
Fabrication vs. erection cost separation. If you fabricate and erect, those are two fundamentally different operations with different cost structures. Fabrication is shop-based: cutting, welding, assembly, coatings. Erection is field-based: rigging, cranes, ironworkers, connections. We track them as separate cost centers within each job so you can see the margin on each phase independently.