Bookkeeping for contractors has to answer a question general small-business bookkeeping doesn't: which jobs are actually making money? Our contractor bookkeeping tracks job costs, progress billing, retainage, and 1099 subcontractor payments project by project — not just as one blended number for the whole company — handled by a dedicated team and reviewed by a US-licensed CPA. US-quality accounting at offshore pricing, with flat monthly fees instead of an hourly rate that punishes you for taking on more jobs.
General contractors, home services businesses, and skilled trades don't run one business — they run several jobs at once, each with its own contract, its own crew and materials, and its own risk of quietly losing money. Generic bookkeeping tells you the company made a profit this quarter. Contractor bookkeeping tells you which jobs made it, and which ones ate the margin from the ones that did.
Every job is set up as its own cost center inside your accounting software, so labor, materials, subcontractor costs, and overhead allocations roll up to a per-project profit and loss, not just a company-wide number.
Progress invoices are tracked against each contract's total value, with retainage withheld by the client recorded separately so you can see what's billed, what's collected, and what's still held back on every job.
W-9s collected and organized, subcontractor payments tracked all year against the $600 reporting threshold, and 1099-NEC forms prepared and filed at year-end — no January scramble to reconstruct who you paid.
Materials, tools, rented equipment, and job-site vehicle costs are coded to the correct job and the correct account, so cost-of-goods-sold and overhead don't get blended together on your P&L.
With several jobs running at different stages — deposits in, materials paid out, retainage not yet released — we keep a monthly cash flow view so a profitable job on paper doesn't turn into a cash crunch in practice.
Books closed and job-costed in a way your tax preparer (ours or your own) can use directly at filing season, with subcontractor 1099s already reconciled against your books.
We start with a free consultation to understand your trade, how many jobs you typically run at once, and how job costs are tracked today (if at all). From there, onboarding typically looks like this:
See our core process on the bookkeeping services page.
Our contractor bookkeeping clients span general and specialty contractors, home services businesses, and independent trades running multiple jobs at once. If you've outgrown a spreadsheet, a shoebox of receipts, or a local bookkeeper who doesn't job-cost, this is the service.
Remodeling, general construction, and specialty trades running fixed-bid and T&M jobs side by side, each needing its own profitability picture.
Electricians, plumbers, HVAC, landscaping, and similar trades juggling service calls and larger installation jobs at the same time.
Growing crews and subcontractor networks that need clean 1099 tracking and job costing before tax season, not after.
If your business runs on trucks and equipment moving between job sites rather than jobs with a fixed address, our trucking accounting services page covers the closely related but distinct needs of owner-operators and small fleets — per-vehicle and per-driver profitability and IFTA fuel tax reporting instead of per-job costing. Many field-service businesses recognize themselves in both pages; the accounting principle is the same (know your profitability at the unit level, not just company-wide), the specifics are not.
Everything above is delivered remotely through cloud accounting software, so we serve contractors across the US the same way regardless of city or state, with no drop in service quality if you're not near a major metro.
Pricing is based on transaction volume, number of active jobs, and whether catch-up work is needed — never an open-ended hourly rate that grows every time you take on another job. Packages are billed at a flat monthly rate — get your quote depending on complexity; catch-up and cleanup projects are quoted separately after a books review.
Contractor bookkeeping is a job-costed layer on top of the fundamentals — these related pages go deeper on the core service and on the closely related trucking niche:
Need financial statement review, controller-level oversight, or CFO-adjacent advisory on top of job-costed bookkeeping? That's the layer above this page — see accounting services.
Job costing tracks income and expenses at the individual project level instead of lumping everything into one company-wide P&L. For contractors, that's the difference between knowing your business made money this year and knowing which jobs actually made money — a fixed-bid remodel might look profitable on paper while a T&M service call is quietly losing money on labor overruns. We set up your chart of accounts and QuickBooks Online Projects (or class/location tracking) so every job shows its own revenue, direct costs, and margin.
Yes. We track subcontractor payments throughout the year, collect and organize W-9s, flag which subs cross the $600 reporting threshold, and prepare 1099-NEC forms for year-end filing. Keeping this current monthly instead of scrambling every January is one of the most common reasons contractors bring us in.
Yes. We record progress invoices against each job's contract value, track retainage withheld by the client separately from recognized revenue, and keep an aging view of what's been billed, collected, and still held back — so your books reflect the real cash position on a job, not just the invoice total.
For most contractor clients we work inside QuickBooks Online using Projects (or class and location tracking on older plans), so job costing lives in the same software you already use for invoicing and payroll rather than a separate system you have to reconcile against. We also support Xero for clients already on that platform.
General bookkeeping reconciles accounts and produces one set of financial statements for the whole business. Contractor bookkeeping does that plus job costing, progress billing and retainage tracking, subcontractor 1099 compliance, and categorizing materials and equipment costs against the right job — the layer that tells you which types of work are actually worth taking on.
