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Contractor bookkeeping guides
Job costing, retainage, subcontractors, progress billing, equipment. Plain English, written by a bookkeeper who works only with contractors.
The guides
These are the questions that come up once a contractor's books are big enough to matter and complicated enough to go wrong. None of them require an accounting background to read, and none of them assume you have time to read twice.
The extra work gets done and gets billed. The cost of doing it disappears into general materials and never reaches the job. Here is the setup that prevents it, the four-step workflow, and the deposit mistake that creates phantom profit.
Job costing · Read the guide →Retainage is your profit and it is not your cash. What the state caps on public work, what it does not cap on private work, the two defensible ways to account for it, and why it must never sit in ordinary receivables.
Construction accounting · Read the guide →The first change to this number since 1954 takes effect for payments made in 2026. What changed, what did not, why payment method decides the answer, and the one rule that eliminates most January pain.
Subcontractors · Read the guide →Billed, earned and collected move at different speeds. Two balance-sheet accounts make the profit and loss statement honest again, and four sanity checks tell you whether yours is currently lying to you.
Financial reporting · Read the guide →The $2,500 de minimis line and why a written policy matters, the financed-truck error that turns up in cleanup after cleanup, how to tell an operating lease from a finance lease, and why the machine belongs on the job.
Equipment and assets · Read the guide →Free tool
A spreadsheet that takes one finished job and gives you the real number — after labor burden and after the overhead that job had to carry — plus what it paid you per field hour. Ten minutes, no card, works in Excel or Google Sheets.
Quick answers
Pricing, cleanup tiers, what we do and do not do, how access and security work — those are on the frequently asked questions page, answered plainly and without a form in the way.
Looking for how any of this applies to a specific trade? We keep dedicated pages for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, and general contracting.
Send us your QuickBooks Online file and we will tell you exactly what is wrong with it — free, in plain English, with no call required.
Get your free books diagnostic →Tell us where the books stand today. You'll get a written assessment and a fixed-price quote within one business day — no call required.
Prefer to talk? Email hello@flowbookkeepingservices.com or call (843) 749-8691.
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