CFO & Accounting · Construction
Construction CFO & Accounting for Contractors
Job costing, WIP schedules, retainage, and bonding-ready financials — built the way a surety underwriter, a bank, and your own bid desk actually need to see the numbers.
This is where Protea was built. General contractors and specialty trades run into a financial problem most accounting setups aren't designed to solve: profitability doesn't live at the business level, it lives at the job level, and it's frequently invisible until the job is finished — by which point the information is useless for pricing the next one.
Job costing, WIP schedules, percentage-of-completion revenue recognition, and retainage tracking aren't optional extras for a contractor — they're the difference between knowing which jobs actually made money and finding out at tax time that the year was worse than it felt.
Standard small-business bookkeeping treats every dollar the same regardless of which job it came from, which works fine for a service business selling one thing to one customer at a time. It breaks down the moment a contractor is running six jobs at once, each with its own crew, its own material costs, its own draw schedule, and its own retainage held back until final acceptance. Without job-level tracking, those six jobs get blended into one undifferentiated number — and the two jobs quietly losing money hide behind the four that are doing fine.
What's Included
What construction accounting actually covers
Job Costing
Costs tracked at the job level, in real time — not reconstructed from a general ledger after the job is already finished.
WIP Schedules & Over/Under Billings
Work-in-progress schedules that show which jobs are actually on track, and which are quietly over- or under-billed.
Percentage-of-Completion Accounting
Revenue recognized against actual job progress — the standard method for long-duration contracts, done correctly.
Retainage Tracking
Retainage held back by GCs or owed to subs tracked as its own line item, not folded into AR as if it behaves the same way.
Subcontractor & 1099 Tracking
Subcontractor payments, lien waivers, and 1099 reporting kept current — not assembled in a panic every January.
Bonding Capacity & Surety-Ready Financials
Financials built to the standard a surety underwriter expects, so a bonding-line increase isn't a surprise fire drill.
Who this is for
General contractors, specialty trades, and subcontractors who need to know which jobs actually made money — not just whether the year as a whole was profitable — and businesses heading into a bonding-line conversation or a bank relationship that requires WIP and job-level reporting they don't currently produce.
It's also the right fit for a contractor who has outgrown the owner doing the books themselves at night, or whose current bookkeeper is competent at general ledger work but has never actually built a WIP schedule or run percentage-of-completion revenue recognition — a specific skill set that standard bookkeeping training doesn't cover.
Equipment financing decisions, bid pricing, and crew capacity planning all get sharper once job-level data is reliable — which is also the foundation for lender and surety packages built on top of it.
How this connects to tax
Contractors operating in more than one jurisdiction — a job site across a state line, a crew working out-of-state for a season — pick up multi-state tax exposure that's easy to miss until it's a problem. And most contractors run through an S-Corp or similar pass-through entity, which makes S-Corp tax preparation coordinated directly with your job-cost data — not re-explained from scratch at tax time.
Construction CFO Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
What contractors ask before bringing in construction-specific accounting.
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