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.
What Excavation Contractors Need From Their Books
Equipment cost tracking by job. We allocate equipment costs, both owned and rented, to specific jobs based on usage. That means your job cost report reflects the real cost of the CAT 330 sitting on site for three weeks, not just the labor and materials. You’ll know whether the job covered its equipment nut or whether you subsidized it from somewhere else.
Fuel and maintenance as a percentage of job cost. For excavation contractors, fuel and equipment maintenance are major cost drivers that vary significantly by project type and soil conditions. We track them by job so you can see the impact and factor it into future bids.
Mobilization billing. Getting equipment to the site costs money: transport, setup, permits. We track mobilization costs separately and make sure your billing captures the mobilization charges in your contract.
Work type profitability. Site clearing, mass excavation, utility trenching, grading, and site development all carry different margins. We set up cost codes that let you compare profitability across the types of work you do.
Subcontractor and hauling cost management. If you’re subbing out hauling, paving, or other site work, those costs need to be tracked by job and reconciled against your sub contracts. We manage the AP side so nothing falls through the cracks.
Equipment depreciation and tax strategy. With heavy iron, your depreciation decisions have major tax implications. Section 179 on a new excavator, bonus depreciation timing, cost recovery on trade-ins. We coordinate your equipment purchases with your tax strategy.
The Problems We Solve for Excavation Contractors
Excavation contractors come to us when they know their equipment costs are eating their margins but can’t pinpoint which jobs are the problem. When they’ve got three different fuel accounts and none of them tie to specific projects. When the bank asks for financial statements before extending a line of credit for a new piece of equipment and the books aren’t in shape to show.
We also work with sitework contractors who are scaling up and taking on bigger site development packages. Moving from $1M to $5M in revenue means more equipment, more crews, longer project timelines, and more financial complexity. Your bookkeeping needs to grow with you.
Common Questions From Excavation Contractors
How do you allocate owned equipment costs to jobs? We calculate a fully loaded hourly or daily rate for each piece of major equipment, including depreciation, insurance, fuel, and maintenance. That rate gets applied to jobs based on usage, so your job cost reports reflect the true equipment cost on each project.
Can you handle multi-entity setups for equipment companies? Yes. Many excavation contractors run a separate LLC for equipment leasing. We manage the intercompany transactions, lease documentation, and consolidated reporting across entities.
What about progress billing on site development contracts? We manage your schedule of values, progress billing, and retainage tracking for GC and owner-direct contracts. Billing goes out on time and matches the work completed.
Let’s Look at Your Equipment Costs
We’ll review your books and show you how equipment-intensive operations should be tracked. If your iron is the biggest question mark in your financials, we’ll help you answer it.