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Contractor bookkeeping guides
Job costing, retainage, subcontractors, progress billing, equipment. Plain English, written by a QuickBooks-certified bookkeeper in South Carolina.
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 →Quick answers
Pricing, cleanup tiers, what is and is not included, 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? There are dedicated pages for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, and general contracting.
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