BACK-OFFICE EXPERTS FOR GROWING BUSINESSES
Bookkeeping for Contractors and Trade Businesses
Bookkeeping for contractors means costing every job individually, tracking retainage and customer deposits correctly, recognizing revenue as work is performed, and maintaining subcontractor payments for 1099s year-round. Hanson Ledgers works with DFW contractors from $397 per month. Request a free consultation.
Bookkeeping That Tells You Which Jobs Made Money
A contractor can be busy every week of the year, invoice a healthy number, and still finish worse off than the year before. It happens constantly, and the reason is almost always the same: the books show whether the business made money, but not which jobs made it.
That single blind spot compounds. Bids get priced from the last similar job, which was itself priced from instinct. A category of work quietly runs at a loss for two years because it feels busy and the deposits keep arriving.
Hanson Ledgers works with general and specialty trade contractors across the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, where construction is one of the largest employers in the region.
Why Contractor Bookkeeping Is Genuinely Different
Costs belong to jobs, not just categories. A generic setup records lumber as materials expense. A contractor setup records lumber as materials expense on the Henderson job. The first tells you what you spent. The second tells you whether the job was worth taking.
Cash and profit diverge sharply. Deposits arrive before work is performed. Retainage is held long after it is finished. A contractor can have money in the bank and be losing on the job, or be profitable and unable to make payroll. Books that ignore the distinction actively mislead.
Subcontractors create year-round obligations. Every subcontractor payment carries a 1099 implication. Reconstructing a year of payments each January, chasing W-9s from people you last spoke to in June, is a self-inflicted problem that monthly tracking removes.
Revenue is lumpy and seasonal. Weather, permits, and inspection schedules move revenue between months in ways nobody controls. Single-month snapshots are close to meaningless.
Equipment is a recurring capital decision. Purchases, financing, and depreciation materially change both the tax picture and true job cost, and most contractors have no visibility into what a machine actually costs per hour of use.
What We Track for Contractors
- Job costing. Labor, materials, subcontractors, and equipment allocated by job so gross margin is visible per project rather than per year.
- Work in progress. What is committed, what is billed, and what remains, so revenue is recognized as work is performed.
- Retainage. Tracked as a receivable, not counted as collected cash.
- Customer deposits and progress billing. Recorded as liabilities until earned.
- Subcontractor payments and 1099s. Tracked through the year with W-9s maintained.
- Equipment and depreciation. Purchases, financing, and depreciation handled so the tax and cost pictures are both right.
- Payroll and burden. True labor cost including taxes and insurance, which is what belongs in a bid rather than the hourly wage.
- Change orders. Captured and billed, because unbilled change orders are one of the most common sources of quiet margin loss.
What Job-Level Visibility Changes
The first few months of real job costing usually produce at least one genuinely unwelcome discovery. A category of work everyone assumed was solid turns out to run at eight percent gross margin. A particular type of client generates constant change orders that never get billed. A crew configuration that felt efficient is consuming more hours than the estimate assumed.
That is uncomfortable and it is the entire point. Every one of those is fixable once visible and permanently expensive while it is not.
What follows is more useful. Bids get built from actual historical cost rather than from the last similar job. Work that consistently underperforms gets priced properly or declined without guilt. Estimates get compared against actuals so the estimating itself improves. And decisions about equipment, hiring, or taking on a larger project get made against real numbers.
The Cash Flow Problem Contractors Know Well
Construction has a structurally awkward cash cycle. You buy materials and make payroll before the customer pays. Progress billing helps but rarely closes the gap. Retainage sits with the customer for months after completion. Growth makes it worse, because a bigger job means a bigger gap to fund.
Accurate books do not fix that on their own, but they make it visible far enough ahead to manage. Knowing in week two that week six will be tight is an entirely different situation from finding out on payroll morning.
For contractors who want that formalized, our fractional CFO services add rolling cash-flow forecasting, capacity modelling, and lender support. That last one matters: contractors bidding larger work usually need bonding or a credit line, and neither is available without financial statements that hold up to scrutiny.
What It Costs
Monthly bookkeeping starts at 397 dollars per month and scales with accounts and transaction volume. Most contractors with several accounts, regular subcontractor activity, and job-level tracking sit in the 597 to 897 dollar range. Full pricing is on our Bookkeeping Support page.
The fee is worth weighing against a single mispriced job. A contractor bidding a 40,000 dollar project eight points light on margin has given away more than a year of bookkeeping on one estimate, and will likely repeat the error until the data shows it.
If the Books Are Behind
Falling behind is close to universal in this trade, usually after a heavy season. If the books simply have not been done, that is catch-up bookkeeping, reconstructed from bank and card statements. If records exist but jobs were never costed and categorization has drifted, that is QuickBooks cleanup. If you are setting up properly for the first time, QuickBooks setup gets job costing right from the start, which is far cheaper than retrofitting it.
Support Beyond the Books
Contractors carry an administrative load that has nothing to do with building. Alongside bookkeeping, Hanson Ledgers provides Administrative Support for quote requests, scheduling, and client communication, operations support for documented processes and crew coordination, and technology support for field software, devices, and security.
Heather Hanson leads bookkeeping, executive support, and operations. Kevin Hanson leads technology. You can read about both on our about page.
Start With One Question
The consultation is free, and the most revealing way in is a single question: can you tell us the gross margin on your last three completed jobs? If the answer is no, or is a guess, that is exactly what job costing fixes.
Who We Work With
General contractors running residential and light commercial projects. Specialty trades across electrical, plumbing, HVAC, roofing, concrete, and framing. Remodelers and custom builders managing long project timelines and heavy change-order activity. Landscape and outdoor construction firms with pronounced seasonality. Service and repair operations mixing scheduled work with emergency calls at very different margins.
The common thread is not size or trade. It is that revenue arrives by project, costs attach to projects, and the business cannot be managed properly from a single annual profit figure.
Getting Started Without Disrupting the Work
Contractors are reasonably wary of anything that adds admin during a busy season, so the onboarding is built to avoid that.
The first step is a review of the existing file and a conversation about how jobs are actually run and billed. From there we set up job costing structure, which is largely our work rather than yours. What we need from the field is modest and specific: consistent job names, and costs coded to jobs at the point they are incurred rather than reconstructed later.
That last habit is the only real change most crews notice, and it takes seconds per transaction. Everything downstream, the reconciliation, the WIP tracking, the 1099 maintenance, the reporting, happens without you.
Bookkeeping for Contractors: Frequently Asked Questions
What is job costing and why does it matter?
Job costing assigns every cost — labor, materials, subcontractors, equipment — to the specific job it belongs to. Without it you can only see whether the business made money overall, not which jobs made it and which lost it. That makes accurate bidding close to impossible.
Do you handle 1099s for subcontractors?
Yes. We track subcontractor payments through the year and maintain W-9 information, so 1099 season is a report rather than a January reconstruction project. We coordinate with your CPA on the filing itself.
Can you track retainage?
Yes. Retainage is recorded as a receivable rather than counted as collected revenue, so your balance sheet reflects what you can actually access. Contractors who skip this consistently overstate available cash.
How do you handle progress billing and deposits?
Customer deposits and progress payments are recorded as liabilities until the work is performed, then recognized as revenue. This keeps profit from appearing in the month you were paid rather than the month you did the work.
I use a construction platform. Can you work with it?
Usually yes. We work in QuickBooks Online and integrate with common construction and field service platforms. If yours does not integrate cleanly we will tell you honestly what the workaround costs.
How much does bookkeeping for contractors cost?
Monthly bookkeeping starts at $397 per month and scales with accounts and transaction volume. Contractors with several bank accounts, heavy subcontractor activity, and job-level tracking typically sit in the $597 to $897 range.
My books are behind after a busy season. Can you help?
Yes, and it is extremely common in this trade. Catch-up bookkeeping reconstructs the missing period from bank and card statements. Tell us how far behind you are and we will scope it honestly.
Do You Know the Margin on Your Last Three Jobs?
If the answer is no, or a guess, that is exactly what job costing fixes. Tell us what you build and where the books stand, and we will tell you what it takes.
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