BEST ACCOUNTANT FOR MASONRY CONTRACTORS?
The best accountant for a masonry contractor is one who tracks waste against the estimate, treats scaffold as its own cost, and measures labor in units per crew hour. Keep a CPA for tax and compliance. Add a construction CFO when the question turns to margin and cash. SPM is that CFO for masonry subs doing $1M to $12M. It is not a CPA firm: nobody at SPM is a CPA, and SPM does no tax preparation, audit or review work.
A CPA answers what happened and files it. Masonry margin is decided by three numbers that a standard set of books never isolates: how much material was wasted, what the scaffold cost, and how many units a crew laid per hour. Each one is set in the bid and settled on the wall, and the difference is the profit. Masonry contractor job costing has to record all three, or the year ends with a good return and no explanation for a thin margin.
WHAT IT MEANS.
The right accountant for a masonry contractor is one who tracks waste, scaffold and lay rate as job costs of their own, and who knows where an accountant's work stops and a construction CFO's forward work starts.
Masonry looks like a labor trade, and the labor is where the bid is written. The margin is lost in the details around it. Brick and block waste from cuts, breakage and layout complexity is a real line. Above ten feet, access becomes a second job. A crew's daily lay rate swings by a factor of five between ornate work and a plain wall.
A general accountant books material as material and scaffold as equipment or rent. The owner needs them against the bid, wall by wall. The sections below split the work into what a general accountant misses, what to ask for, and what SPM covers.
WHAT A GENERALIST LEAVES OUT.
Waste is a cost line, and it gets estimated like a rounding error
Brick and block waste from cuts, breakage and layout complexity runs 8 to 10 percent on standard work and up to 15 percent on complex layouts or repairs. Estimate 5 percent and build at 12 and the overrun comes straight out of margin. A general ledger books all material as one expense, so the variance never appears as its own number.
Scaffold is a second job inside every job
Above 10 feet, access becomes its own project, and scaffold premiums run 50 to 100 percent of labor cost for the stages of work at height. Owned scaffold gets buried in overhead and rented scaffold gets buried in materials. Nobody can say whether the wall at height made money, or whether owning the scaffold beats renting it.
Bids use the best-day lay rate
A crew's daily lay rate ranges from 200 bricks on ornate work to 1,000 on simple walls, with experienced masons at 400 to 600 on standard work. A bid priced on the best-day rate and built at the average loses money on every wall. Without labor tracked in units per crew hour, the miss looks like bad luck when it was a bid assumption.
WHAT THE RIGHT PERSON DOES.
Material delivered is compared to material installed on every job, by material and by layout type. The variance becomes a number you can see, and the next bid uses your own waste history and drops the rule of thumb.
Scaffold gets a rate, owned or rented, and each job is charged for the stages that needed it. That shows what work at height really costs and gives you the data to decide whether to buy, rent or price the access separately.
Bricks or block laid per crew hour, by job type, are compared to the bid every week. A crew running below the bid rate is visible in the first week of a wall, long before the job ends.
THE OUTPUTS, NAMED.
FLAT MONTHLY FEE. NO SURPRISES.
Three tiers, priced by your trailing twelve month revenue. Which one you're in depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. No hourly billing. No payroll. No add-ons.
| Last 12 months revenue | Monthly fee |
|---|---|
| Up to $1M | $1,900 to $2,900 |
| $1M to $3.5M | $2,600 to $3,900 |
| $3.5M to $6.5M | $3,800 to $5,700 |
| $6.5M to $9.5M | $5,100 to $7,100 |
| $9.5M to $12.5M | $6,100 to $8,500 |
| $12.5M to $15.5M | $7,400 to $11,000 |
| $15.5M to $18.5M | $9,400 to $13,500 |
| $18.5M+ | Quoted individually |
Range reflects the three tiers below. Which one you're in depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. No payroll. No hidden line items.
You stop guessing.
You get the CFO work. Job costing built against the way you estimate, a 13 week cash forecast, monthly WIP, and a meeting every month that ends in decisions and never in a report.
Your bookkeeper still does the books.
You stop touching the books.
Everything in Core, and we run the bookkeeping and the controllership as well. Your office stops answering coding questions and stops chasing a reconciliation on the last day of the month.
We do the books. No payroll.
Every job shows its margin while it's still running.
Everything in Executive, plus the job costing and WIP platform set up, loaded with your cost codes, and managed for you every month. You never have to learn it.
We do the books, the job costing, and the software. No payroll.
FREQUENTLY ASKED.
