Know what every job actually makes you.

Most bookkeeping tells you what your business made this month. That's not enough for a contractor. A month can look profitable on paper while one job bled money the whole time — underbid, materials ran over, a crew spent two extra weeks on-site — and a blended P&L will never show you that. Job costing is the difference: tracking income and expenses against each specific job, not just against the calendar.

What job costing actually means

Every material purchase, subcontractor payment, and labor cost gets tagged to the specific job it belongs to, not just dumped into a general expense category. At the end of the job, you can see exactly what it cost against what it billed — not a guess, not an average across your whole business. Set up right in QuickBooks Online, this runs through Projects or class tracking so it's automatic month to month, not a spreadsheet you rebuild by hand.

Built around how contractors actually work

• Job costing: labor, materials, and subs tracked per job, not blended into one P&L
• WIP (work-in-progress) visibility: what's been billed vs. what's actually been spent on active jobs
• Retainage tracked as a receivable, not lost in the noise until the final draw
• 1099 subcontractor tracking, so January isn't a scramble
• Multiple crews and materials tracked separately when a job needs it

A profitable month can hide a job that lost money the whole time.

Why this matters more than a general P&L

Without job costing, you find out a job lost money when the year's numbers come in low, long after you could've done anything about it. With it, you see the problem while the job's still running — a material cost running over budget, a crew taking longer than bid — while there's still time to adjust the next bid, or the next job. See the full breakdown of how job costing actually works for the step-by-step version of this.

Flat pricing, quoted up front

Monthly bookkeeping starts at $300/mo, scoped to your actual job volume at the consult. If your books haven't been touched in a while, cleanup comes first — see how that works.