Bookkeeping for contractors and trades in St. Louis and St. Charles
Which jobs made money, and which just kept you busy.
I'm Kayleigh, and this page is for the trades — remodelers, electricians, HVAC, plumbers, landscapers, roofers. One truck or fifteen. Your books have problems a retail shop's books don't, and most of them come down to one question a bank balance can't answer.
Tell me what you're runningThe parts that actually get messy
Construction bookkeeping goes wrong in places a shop's books never do. These are the five that matter.
Job costing
Materials, labor, subs and equipment landing on the job they belong to instead of in one pile at the bottom of the profit and loss. Without it, a good month can be hiding two jobs that lost money and one that carried them.
Progress billing and retainage
Invoicing against a schedule of values, and tracking what's been held back, so retainage sits in the books as money you are owed rather than money that quietly went missing.
1099 subs
Payment totals tracked per subcontractor across the whole year, with the W-9 on file to match. Kept up as you go, January's 1099 preparation is a report. Left to January, it's archaeology.
Receipts from the truck
The supply house runs, the fuel, the part that went on a personal card at 7am because the job needed it. There is a way to get those in that doesn't involve emptying a glovebox onto the kitchen table.
Change orders
Work that got added on site and never made it onto an invoice. It's the most expensive bookkeeping problem you can have, because it doesn't look like anything at all.
How the month actually goes
Underneath the job layer it's the ordinary rhythm — monthly bookkeeping, the same as anyone else's. Categorize what came in and what went out, reconcile the accounts, close the month. The difference for a contractor is where the costs land on the way through.
QuickBooks Online will do job costing once it's set up to. Setting it up is one of the add-ons, and it's worth doing sooner rather than later. The value is in having a full run of finished jobs to compare, not in switching it on in November.
After that the per-job picture is simply there. What came in against what it cost, job by job, without you reconstructing it from memory at the end of the year.
What I know about costing a job
Straight answer: I haven't spent my career on a job site. I spent several years doing the books at a car dealership, and a good part of that job was costing out deals one at a time — what each one actually made once everything that went into it had been counted. Then five years on an insurance agency's books, which is where the commissions and the payroll came from.
A job is that same problem with different nouns. I'm telling you rather than letting you assume, because it's the sort of thing you'd rather know before you hire someone than after.
I don't do taxes. I keep the books clean so your CPA has less to argue with at filing time, and I'm happy to talk to them directly. For a contractor that matters more than most: what they need at year end is the job and subcontractor detail that either got tracked all year or didn't.
What it costs
Pricing
Monthly bookkeeping for a contractor sits in the same published tiers as everything else. Where you land depends on how many accounts there are, how much moves through them, and what shape things are in when I start. The tiers are on the homepage.
QuickBooks setup and 1099 preparation are add-ons, quoted on their own. We settle the number before you commit to anything.
If the books need catching up before any of this can start, that's its own piece of work. See catch-up and cleanup — jobs can't be costed backwards out of accounts that were never reconciled.
Tell me what you're running
What trade, roughly how many jobs you've got going, how you bill them, and whether there are subs. That's enough for me to tell you what this would look like. I'll write back.
Or email info@gatewayledgers.com if that's easier.
- You tell me what you run and how it's billed.
- I read it and write back with questions.
- We work out what you need, and what it costs.