Cost and project accounting

Every cost that touches a job gets coded to it directly: direct labor hours and burden, materials and subcontractor invoices, equipment time, and a documented share of overhead. We set up the job or class structure inside your existing chart of accounts so job-level reporting rolls up cleanly into the same profit and loss statement you already review, rather than sitting in a separate system nobody reconciles.

Work-in-progress is tracked for every job not yet complete or billed, so costs incurred ahead of billing show up as an asset rather than an expense that distorts the current period. When a job closes, the WIP balance clears and the final job cost report locks alongside the standard month-end close. Job profitability is reported every period next to the company-wide statement, not as a once-a-year exercise.

We start by mapping every cost type your business actually incurs, labor, materials, subcontractors, equipment, permits, to a job-coding structure inside your accounting system. Timesheets, vendor invoices and purchase orders get tagged to a job at entry, the same close cycle as the rest of your bookkeeping, not batched separately at month end.

Overhead is allocated on a method we agree with you in writing, commonly direct labor hours or direct labor cost, applied consistently every period so job comparisons stay meaningful over time. At close, WIP is rolled forward for open jobs, completed jobs are reconciled to their final cost, and a job profitability report is delivered alongside your standard financial statements.

Construction and trades contractors running multiple jobs at once, custom manufacturers where no two orders cost the same, and project-based professional-services firms billing by engagement rather than a flat retainer all need job-level data a blended company-wide margin cannot give them. If every job your business runs looks roughly the same in cost and duration, company-wide margin is usually enough and this layer is not worth the overhead.

It also fits any business bidding future work off past performance: a contractor pricing a new job should be pricing off what similar completed jobs actually cost, not off a company average that blends a profitable job with a losing one.

The most common gap we find is overhead never allocated to jobs at all, so every job looks more profitable than it actually is until the overhead bill lands at the company level and margin disappears in aggregate. The second is labor burden, payroll taxes, workers' compensation, benefits, tracked only at the company level instead of loaded onto the job that actually used the labor.

We also regularly find work-in-progress simply not tracked, so a job in progress either shows zero cost until it is billed, understating the balance sheet, or shows full cost with no offsetting asset, distorting the period's profit and loss. Subcontractor invoices coded to a general expense account instead of the job they belong to is another frequent fix, along with change orders that were verbally approved but never flowed into the job's cost or contract value.

Job costing runs inside QuickBooks Online, Xero, NetSuite or Sage Intacct, using the class, project or job-tracking features native to each platform so the structure lives inside your existing file rather than a bolt-on system you have to maintain separately. NetSuite and Sage Intacct carry more native support for multi-dimensional job and overhead-allocation reporting; QuickBooks Online and Xero can run effective job costing for most contractors and smaller manufacturers with a disciplined coding structure.

Where you already run a dedicated field-management or estimating tool for scheduling and bids, we code the financial side to match it so job numbers stay consistent between the two systems, without requiring you to move data entry into a new platform.

Job and project accounting is scoped based on job volume, the number of active jobs in a given period, and whether percentage-of-completion revenue recognition is required. Straightforward job costing for a handful of concurrent jobs typically fits inside the Growth tier on the published rate card at /us/pricing; multi-entity contractors, bonding-company reporting requirements or complex percentage-of-completion schedules usually move into a Scale-tier custom quote, confirmed after a scoping call.

Any catch-up work needed to rebuild job costs for jobs already in progress when the engagement starts is scoped and quoted separately from the ongoing monthly fee.

For contracts spanning more than one reporting period, we help determine whether percentage-of-completion or completed-contract treatment fits your financials and your tax return, since the two do not have to match. On the books, percentage-of-completion recognizes revenue and gross profit as the job progresses, using a cost-to-cost or units-of-work method agreed with you, so a partially finished job shows partial profit instead of zero.

On the tax side, IRC Section 460 generally requires the percentage-of-completion method for long-term contracts meeting the statute's definition, with a look-back calculation on Form 8697 reconciling estimated progress against actual results once a contract completes. We prepare the underlying job data this calculation needs; your credentialed tax preparer files the return and any required look-back interest computation.