If you are a general contractor or own a supporting business such as plumbing, electrical, engineering, painting, drywall, insulation, siding, roofing, or other construction trade, your primary bookkeeping concern is job costing. To be profitable, you must bid a job accurately, measure your profitability when the job is done, identify any mistakes, and continually improve the accuracy of your bidding.
Consequently, it is of utmost importance to set up your bookkeeping software to make this process as easy for you as possible. Custom-designed reports in addition to standard reports will help you assess your performance. While most software packages provide these capabilities, our current construction clients choose to use QuickBooks® software.
QuickBooks® is inexpensive, user-friendly, and comprehensive in its design. Its key features, most relevant to the construction trades, include:
- Ability to tie Income, Cost of Goods Sold, and Expense items to customer jobs
- Time cards within the software for recording dates and hours worked per job
- Ability to accept the downloading of time data from other time card programs
- Payroll processing that allocates payroll costs (wages, payroll taxes, workers compensation costs) to jobs
- Workers compensation tracking and reporting
- Estimate form (bid or proposal)
- Progress invoicing
- Purchase Orders
- Inventory management
- 1099's for reporting payments to subcontractors
- Sales tax tracking and reporting
- Tracking by Customer Type or other category
- Profit & Loss by Job report
If you are planning to use QuickBooks®, a professional bookkeeper, who is also a QuickBooks® ProAdvisor, is your best option for set up, training, and helping you choose the best options for doing your bookkeeping. We have many construction clients and would be very happy to help you with all of your needs.
Your CPA will appreciate your complete and accurate bookkeeping and tax preparation will be simpler and less costly. Most of all, you'll have the information you need to make sound business decisions about how to manage and grow your business.
For more information or to set up your free consultation, please call Kathryn at (856) 803-4651 or email us at: Kathryn@TiffanyAccounting.com
No comments:
Post a Comment