Bookkeeping for Contractors
Bookkeeping for contractors who need to know which jobs actually made money.
Most bookkeeping treats a construction business like any other business: money in, money out, a profit and loss at the end of the month. That tells you whether you made money. It does not tell you which jobs made money, and for a contractor that is the only number that changes what you do next.
We keep books for Spokane and Spokane Valley contractors — general contractors, subs, and the trades — with job costing as the point of the exercise rather than an afterthought.
What's different about contractor books
Job costing by project
Every dollar of labor, materials, subcontractor cost and equipment gets assigned to the job it belongs to. Done properly, this means you can look at any completed project and see what you bid, what it cost, and where the gap came from. Done poorly — or not at all — you find out you are losing money on a whole category of work about a year after you could have changed it.
Labor tracked in hours, not just dollars
Washington calculates L&I premiums on hours worked, by risk classification. If your payroll is only tracking dollars, your premiums are an estimate and your job costs are wrong at the same time. Hours have to be captured correctly at the source, which means your time tracking and your books need to agree.
Worker classification that gets scrutinized
Construction sits under stricter statutory tests than most industries for deciding whether someone is an employee or an independent contractor. A crew member you have been paying on a 1099 for two seasons is the kind of thing that becomes expensive after an audit, not before. We flag it while it is still cheap to fix.
Gross receipts, not profit
Washington's B&O tax is assessed on what you take in, before expenses. On a $300,000 job with $290,000 of cost, the tax is calculated on the $300,000. Contractors also frequently report under more than one B&O classification depending on the type of work and who the customer is, and misclassification here is common.
Money that isn't yours yet
Deposits, draws, progress billings and retainage all hit the bank on a different schedule than the work is earned. A contractor's bank balance is a famously bad indicator of how the business is doing. Books that handle this correctly tell you what you have actually earned, separately from what you are holding.
Equipment
Trucks, trailers and machinery are capital purchases with depreciation schedules, not expenses to be written off in the month you bought them. Getting this right changes both your tax position and what your balance sheet says when you go for financing.
What you get each month
- A profit and loss and a balance sheet, reconciled and closed
- Job-level cost reporting — estimated against actual on every active project
- Payroll run and filed, including L&I and the state programs
- 1099s prepared at year end for the subs who need them
- A bookkeeper who answers the phone, the same business day, every time
Who this is for
Contractors in Spokane, Spokane Valley, Liberty Lake, Cheney and across the Inland Northwest running anywhere from a two-truck operation to a crew of twenty. If you are bidding work without knowing your true cost per hour, or you have a sense that some jobs are carrying others but you cannot prove which, that is exactly the problem this solves.