By Tammy Hoang, QuickBooks ProAdvisor — Construction Bookkeeping Specialist | Construction Cost Accounting (949) 889-3283 | constructioncostaccounting.com If you run a construction business, you've probably wondered whether the financial side really needs to be different from any other company's. It does — and the gap is bigger than most owners realize. Construction bookkeeping isn't regular bookkeeping with a hard hat on. It tracks money in a fundamentally different way, b

By Tammy Hoang, QuickBooks ProAdvisor — Construction Bookkeeping Specialist | Construction Cost Accounting (949) 889-3283 | constructioncostaccounting.com Every electrical contractor is running a small warehouse on wheels and most don't think of it that way. Each truck is carrying thousands of dollars in wire, breakers, devices, conduit, fittings, and fixtures. Multiply that across a fleet and you've got serious money rolling around the county every day. Yet electrician inv

By Tammy Hoang, QuickBooks ProAdvisor — Construction Bookkeeping Specialist | Construction Cost Accounting (949) 889-3283 | constructioncostaccounting.com Ask any electrical contractor what they'd most like to have, and somewhere near the top is this: revenue they can count on every month without chasing the next service call. That's exactly what an electrical service agreement delivers — a customer who pays you on a schedule to keep their electrical systems maintained, ins

By Tammy Hoang, QuickBooks ProAdvisor — Construction Bookkeeping Specialist | Construction Cost Accounting (949) 889-3283 | constructioncostaccounting.com Electrical work runs on permits and inspections more than almost any other trade. Pull the panel, you need a permit. Add circuits, run a new service, do a tenant improvement — permit, then inspection, sometimes several. It's a constant, unavoidable part of the business. And yet electrical permit cost tracking is one of th

By Tammy Hoang, QuickBooks ProAdvisor — Construction Bookkeeping Specialist | Construction Cost Accounting (949) 889-3283 | constructioncostaccounting.com Here's something that makes electrical contractor payroll genuinely different from payroll in most businesses: your crew isn't one kind of worker at one rate. You've got apprentices learning the trade, journeymen running independently, and foremen or masters leading the job — three tiers, three very different costs, and t

By Tammy Hoang, QuickBooks ProAdvisor — Construction Bookkeeping Specialist | Construction Cost Accounting (949) 889-3283 | constructioncostaccounting.com Here's the problem with most electrical contractor bookkeeping: it treats an electrical business like one company, when really you're running two. You've got service work — the calls, the repairs, the panel swaps, the troubleshooting that keeps the phone ringing — and you've got project work — the new construction, the co

By Tammy Hoang, QuickBooks ProAdvisor — Construction Bookkeeping Specialist | Construction Cost Accounting (949) 889-3283 | constructioncostaccounting.com If you've been reading our 2026 construction bookkeeping series — Cost Codes (Blog #1) → [link to: /post/construction-cost-codes-2026-guide], Job Costing Reports (Blog #2) → [link to: /post/construction-job-costing-reports-2026-guide], and WIP Reports (Blog #3) → [link to: /post/construction-wip-reports-2026-guide] — th

By Tammy Hoang, QuickBooks ProAdvisor — Construction Bookkeeping Specialist | Construction Cost Accounting (949) 889-3283 | constructioncostaccounting.com Houston is the #1 metro in the United States for construction job growth right now. Between February 2025 and February 2026, the Houston area added 11,200 construction jobs — the most of any US metro per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Total construction starts in the region are forecast to grow 6% in 2026 after a 3% decl

By Tammy Hoang, CFMA, QuickBooks ProAdvisor | Construction Cost Accounting You found a bookkeeper who says they know Procore. They probably don't — not at the level your jobs require. Procore is not accounting software. It is a project management platform that connects to your accounting system. A bookkeeper who has clicked around in Procore's dashboard is not the same as one who has configured the ERP integration, mapped your cost codes, managed the accounting approver workf

By Tammy Hoang, CFMA, QuickBooks ProAdvisor | Construction Cost Accounting If your crews are managing jobs in Procore and your books are in Sage 100 Contractor or QuickBooks, you are probably entering the same data twice. Change orders go into Procore for the project manager and into Sage for the bookkeeper. Subcontractor invoices get processed in the field and re-entered in the office. Job costs sit in Sage until the monthly close — which means your project manager is making

One framing contractor I worked with discovered $47,000 in unbilled change orders sitting in a project management tool that never made it to QuickBooks. In 2026, this "app isolation" is the silent profit killer for construction SMEs. When your field and office systems don't sync, you are making critical decisions based on stale data. Integration is no longer a luxury—it is a survival skill for firms that want accurate financials without doubling their admin headcount. This g

Most construction business owners are good at building. The job site is where you make your money. The problem is that for far too many contractors, the financial side of the business — the construction bookkeeping for contractors that should be running quietly in the background — is either wrong, months behind, or handled by someone who has never seen a WIP report in their life. According to industry data, nearly 60 percent of construction companies that fail do so not becau