Mount Pleasant Bookkeeper · Custom Build & Remodel
Custom homes, whole-house remodels, and East Cooper renovation work. Fewer jobs, far bigger numbers, and a client who pays you in draws over eight months.
The East Cooper market
A Mount Pleasant contractor might run six jobs a year where a service company runs six hundred. That inverts the accounting risk entirely. When one project represents a meaningful share of annual revenue, a single mispriced change order or an unbilled allowance overage is not a rounding error — it is the year’s profit.
The work here skews toward custom construction and substantial renovation: Old Village restorations, marsh-front builds, kitchen and primary-suite gut jobs in the established neighbourhoods, and new custom homes in the newer developments. Long timelines. Homeowners as the paying client rather than a general contractor. Expectations to match.
What that demands from your books is not more categories. It is discipline about four things: deposits, draws, change orders, and allowances. Get those right and the rest is straightforward.
The four things that decide your margin
Job-level reporting
Every month you get a report showing where each active project stands: contract value, change orders to date, costs incurred, amounts billed, deposits still held, and the margin as it currently sits — not the margin you estimated when you priced it.
That is the number most custom builders genuinely do not have. They know the job feels tight. They find out how tight when it closes. Seeing it at month four instead of month eight is the difference between repricing the remaining scope and simply absorbing the loss.
We also flag anything that needs a decision: an allowance running over, a change order performed but never invoiced, a sub approaching the 1099 threshold without a W-9 on file, or a purchase over the capitalization threshold that should be treated as an asset rather than expensed.
What’s included
Categorization, reconciliation, and a close report every month, reviewed by a person before it reaches you.
Client deposits held as a liability and released as earned. Draw billing matched to actual milestone completion.
Every change order recorded against the original contract, so the gap between what you agreed and what you built stays visible.
Selections tracked against their allowance so overages get billed rather than absorbed.
A live margin figure for every active job — not an estimate, and not a post-mortem.
Subs tracked through the year, and purchases over the threshold flagged for capitalization rather than quietly expensed.
Working with your CPA
We are bookkeepers, not tax preparers, and that distinction is deliberate. Your CPA does the planning and files the return. Our job is to hand them a file so clean that the engagement is quick, the fee is lower, and no one is reconstructing March in the following February.
On custom-build work that matters more than it does elsewhere, because the questions a CPA asks are exactly the ones sloppy books cannot answer. How much of the year-end balance is customer deposits still owed in work rather than income? Which projects crossed the year-end and how were revenue and cost recognized on each? Were vehicle and equipment purchases over the capitalization threshold treated as assets and depreciated, or expensed in one month? Are subcontractor W-9s on file for everyone who crossed the reporting threshold?
Every one of those has a documented answer in a file we maintain, available whenever your CPA asks — not assembled in a panic at the deadline.
Where we work
Service is remote, inside your own QuickBooks Online file. These are the areas our East Cooper work most often covers:
Pricing
No setup fee. No contract. Cancel any time. Start with a free books review.
Send us your QuickBooks and we’ll show you the real margin on your active jobs — free, and with no phone call required.
Get your free books review →