By Tammy Hoang, QuickBooks ProAdvisor — Construction Bookkeeping Specialist | Construction Cost Accounting (949) 889-3283 | constructioncostaccounting.com Here's the paradox that takes down more construction businesses than any other: the company is profitable on paper, the bank balance looks fine most months, and then one Friday there's not enough cash to make payroll. The owner is stunned — "we're making money, how are we out of cash?" The answer is almost always the same

By Tammy Hoang, QuickBooks ProAdvisor — Construction Bookkeeping Specialist | Construction Cost Accounting (949) 889-3283 | constructioncostaccounting.com Here's the brutal reality of running a construction business: most contractors think they know which jobs made money. Most contractors are wrong. The job that felt great on the punch list — finished on time, happy customer, paid on time — often turns out to have lost margin once the final supplier invoices came in. The jo

By Tammy Hoang, QuickBooks ProAdvisor — Construction Bookkeeping Specialist | Construction Cost Accounting (949) 889-3283 | constructioncostaccounting.com Most contractors lose money on jobs they thought were profitable. The root cause is rarely material price spikes, labor overruns, or scope creep alone — it's that the firm's construction cost codes don't tell them the truth about where the money is going. Without a properly structured cost code list, every job's actual pr

By Tammy Hoang, QuickBooks ProAdvisor — Construction Bookkeeping Specialist | Construction Cost Accounting (949) 889-3283 | constructioncostaccounting.com Construction is one of the few industries where the difference between a profitable year and a losing one comes down to the books. Not the bidding, not the field execution, not the customer relationships — the books. A contractor with strong field operations but weak construction accounting routinely underbids jobs, misse

By Tammy Hoang, QuickBooks ProAdvisor | Construction Cost Accounting | (949) 889-3283 Disclaimer: Construction Cost Accounting is a bookkeeping firm, not a CPA firm or law firm. The information in this post reflects general bookkeeping practices used in the construction industry and is intended for informational purposes only. It does not constitute accounting, tax, or legal advice. Readers should consult a licensed CPA or attorney for guidance specific to their situation. Th

By Tammy Hoang, QuickBooks ProAdvisor | Construction Cost Accounting | (949) 889-3283 Bookkeeping for construction companies is not the same as bookkeeping for a retail store, a law firm, or a marketing agency. The construction industry has accounting requirements that simply do not exist in other businesses — job costing that tracks every dollar to a specific project and cost code, WIP schedules that calculate overbilling and underbilling across every active job, retainage a

By Tammy Hoang, QuickBooks ProAdvisor | Construction Cost Accounting | (949) 889-3283 Disclaimer: Construction Cost Accounting is a bookkeeping firm, not a CPA firm or law firm. The information in this post reflects general bookkeeping practices used in the construction industry and is intended for informational purposes only. It does not constitute accounting, tax, or legal advice. Readers should consult a licensed CPA or attorney for guidance specific to their situation. As

By Tammy Hoang, QuickBooks ProAdvisor | Construction Cost Accounting | calendly.com/tammycca/30min Procore Estimating is one of the most widely used construction estimating software platforms in the industry. It is designed to take a contractor from uploaded project plans all the way through digital takeoff, cost database integration, proposal generation, and direct budget transfer — entirely within a single cloud-based environment. For contractors who use Procore across the

By Tammy Hoang, QuickBooks ProAdvisor | Construction Cost Accounting | calendly.com/tammycca/30min Every construction owner I work with has a CPA. What most of them do not have is a construction bookkeeper who makes that CPA relationship actually work. Here is what I mean. Your construction CPA is a tax professional. Their job is to prepare your tax returns, minimize your tax liability, advise on entity structure, and represent you if the IRS ever comes knocking. They are ess

By Tammy Hoang, QuickBooks ProAdvisor | Construction Cost Accounting | calendly.com/tammycca/30min Every month, construction business owners receive a set of financial statements from their bookkeeper or accountant. Most of them look at two numbers — revenue and net income — and move on. The rest of the report sits unread. This is one of the most expensive habits in construction accounting, because the numbers that actually tell you whether your business is healthy are not th

By Tammy Hoang, QuickBooks ProAdvisor | Construction Cost Accounting | calendly.com/tammycca/30min Ask most construction owners about their creditors, and you will get a general answer — the subs, the suppliers, the equipment rental company. Ask them which creditors are past due right now, by how many days, and on which specific jobs, and the answer gets a lot less clear. This is one of the most common and most expensive gaps in construction bookkeeping. Creditors are the bus

By Tammy Hoang, QuickBooks ProAdvisor | Construction Cost Accounting | calendly.com/tammycca/30min Most construction contractors know what a loss looks like when it shows up at year-end — a job that ran over budget, margins that disappeared, a number their CPA presents in April that nobody saw coming. What most contractors do not know is that under GAAP, that loss should have been on the books the moment it became evident — not months later when the damage was done. This is t