Bookkeeping for Construction Companies
In construction, the month you get paid and the month you do the work are rarely the same month, and pretending otherwise is how a busy contractor goes broke profitably. Retainage, progress billing, and work-in-progress are the whole ballgame — and a bookkeeper who treats a job like a coffee shop will get every one of them wrong. We don't.
The WIP schedule is where the truth lives
Cash-basis books tell you when money moved. They do not tell you whether a job is making money, because on a construction job billing and cost march to different drummers. A work-in-progress schedule reconciles what you've billed against what you've actually earned — surfacing the over-billings that flatter a month and the under-billings that quietly mean you're financing the customer.
Get the WIP right and the P&L stops swinging on billing timing. Get it wrong and every month is a mystery you solve after it's over, usually badly.
What clean construction books actually tell you
Costed by job and reconciled through WIP, the books answer the questions that decide the company: real gross margin by project, how each job is tracking against its estimate, and how much cash is locked up in retainage waiting on final acceptance.
That last figure surprises people. Retainage is money you earned and can't touch yet, and if the books don't track it, you'll feel poor on paper while a real receivable sits in someone else's account.
How Kaizen runs it
We run QuickBooks Online with a job-costing setup that actually fits construction, Ramp for cards, and Gusto for payroll including certified-payroll needs where they apply. Then a documented month-end close — including the WIP schedule — lands on the same date every month, in a format a bonding agent or lender can read.
We're named after kaizen, continuous improvement, which on a construction file means the WIP gets more accurate every close and the miscoded material invoice gets caught before it distorts a job's margin. Unglamorous, and exactly what surety underwriters want to see.
What's included
- Job costing by project, phase, and cost code
- Work-in-progress schedule with over/under-billing analysis
- Retainage tracked on both receivables and payables
- Progress billing and AIA-style draws recorded cleanly
- Bank & credit-card reconciliations — every account, every month
- Change-order tracking so scope changes don't leak margin
- 1099 and subcontractor tracking, plus year-end filing
- Monthly data-quality scan — uncategorized, unreconciled, imbalanced items flagged early
Pricing
Straight answers
Do you actually do WIP schedules and over/under billing?
Yes — it's the core of construction bookkeeping, and the thing most generalist bookkeepers skip. We reconcile billings to earned revenue each month so job margins and billing status are real.
Can you produce financials my bonding agent will accept?
That's a big reason clients come to us. Clean job costing, an accurate WIP, and an on-time close in a format surety underwriters and lenders expect.
Our job costing is a mess. How long to fix it?
Month 1 of the Reset rebuilds the cost structure and the backlog. Most catch-ups land inside 30–45 days, then the WIP becomes a reliable monthly output.
Do I need this if I run one job at a time?
If you run small, short jobs and get paid on completion, a good bookkeeper may cover it — we'll be honest about that. Once you carry multiple jobs with retainage and progress billing, WIP-aware books aren't optional.
Related
Free 20-minute books assessment
We'll show you the five things we'd fix first in your books — useful whether you hire us, hire someone, or do neither.
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