Summerville Bookkeeper · New Construction & Trades
Production subdivisions, tract-builder contracts, and crews spread across three counties. When margin per unit is thin, the accounting has to be exact.
The Summerville market
Summerville sits where Dorchester, Berkeley, and Charleston counties meet, and it has spent the last decade absorbing more new residential construction than almost anywhere else in the state. Large master-planned communities, continuous phase releases, and a steady demand for trade crews who can turn units quickly.
That produces a very specific kind of trade business: high volume, repeatable scope, thin margin per unit, and a small number of large builder customers who set the terms. It is a completely different animal from custom work or commercial subcontracting, and it fails in its own particular way.
Volume work hides losses. When you complete forty units a quarter at a similar price, a job that lost money looks identical on the bank statement to a job that made money. The only way to find it is to cost at the unit level.
Where volume work goes wrong
Crew payroll and 1099s
Volume trade work in a growing market almost always means a mix: some employees on payroll, some crews engaged as subcontractors. Both are legitimate. Both have to be documented correctly, and the documentation has to exist before the money moves, not afterwards.
Practically, that means a W-9 collected from every subcontractor before their first payment, accurate tracking of everyone crossing the $2,000 reporting threshold through the year, and payroll records that hold up if anyone ever asks. Reconstructing a year of sub payments in January — chasing W-9s from crews who have moved on to another builder — is a genuinely miserable and avoidable exercise.
We track it continuously and tell you in the monthly close who is approaching the threshold and whose paperwork is still missing, while it is still easy to fix.
What’s included
Categorization, reconciliation, and a close report every month, reviewed by a person before it reaches you.
Every unit costed individually so you can see exactly which lots, phases, and builders actually pay.
Builder deductions matched against your invoices so your revenue and your deposits finally agree.
Monthly payroll runs and reporting included on the Growth and Scale plans.
Subcontractors tracked all year with documentation collected before payment, not the following January.
What share of revenue each builder represents, reported every month, so nothing sneaks up on you.
Growing without running out of money
The most dangerous moment for a Summerville trade business is not a slow quarter. It is a very good one.
A builder offers you another phase. You take it, because turning down work feels absurd. So you add a crew. Payroll goes up this Friday. Fuel and materials go up immediately. The revenue from that phase arrives in thirty, forty-five, sometimes sixty days. For a stretch in the middle you are more profitable than you have ever been and closer to insolvent than you have ever been, at the same time, on paper you cannot read.
This is entirely predictable and therefore entirely preventable. What it takes is knowing three things before you say yes: what a new crew genuinely costs per week fully loaded, how long that specific builder actually takes to pay you rather than what their terms claim, and how many weeks of payroll your current cash covers. We report all three every month, so the answer to the next phase is a decision rather than a gamble.
Where we work
We work remotely inside your own QuickBooks Online file. These are the areas Summerville trade crews most often work:
Pricing
No setup fee. No contract. Cancel any time. Start with a free books review.
Send us your QuickBooks and we’ll cost your last phase lot by lot — free, and with no call required.
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