HOW OFTEN THE BOOKS HAVE TO BE DONE.
Enter transactions weekly and close the books by the tenth of the following month. That's the cadence a construction business needs, because every forward looking report you have reads off closed books. With a quarterly close, the WIP schedule is so old that a cost to complete is an estimate of an estimate. Overbilling reads as profit for two months before anybody catches it. A job that started losing money in week three is found when it's nearly finished. If the books are done whenever the CPA asks, the profit and loss is a tax document, and you can't manage from it. The work is the same amount of work at every cadence. What changes is whether the numbers reach you in time to change an outcome.
The cost of a slower cadence never appears as a line item. That's why it's easy to put the books off. You don't get an invoice for the job you could have corrected at 25 percent complete and caught at 80. You don't get a charge for the quarter you priced work off a report that turned out to be a collections summary. You pay for late books in the decisions you make from them, and that's how the habit lasts in businesses that are otherwise well managed.
Rather talk it through first? Book a 20 minute call. Nothing gets sold on this call.
Want it set up for you? Onboarding only, from $4,500 one time. Books migrated and job costing built, then your own team keeps it up.
WHAT IT MEANS.
Bookkeeping frequency is how often transactions are entered and reconciled. No report built from them can be more current than that.
There are two habits here, and they're different jobs. Weekly is maintenance. Transactions are entered, the receivables aging is reviewed, and the cash forecast is updated from current data. Monthly is the close. That's cutoff, bank reconciliations, the WIP reconciliation, and a fixed set of numbers by the tenth. You need both. Weekly entry with no close gives you current data nobody has verified. A monthly close with no weekly entry takes three weeks and finishes too late to use.
A bookkeeping engagement and a tax engagement are different, and both are legitimate. A CPA filing a return needs the year to be complete and correct, so that work happens after the year is over. A construction business making decisions needs numbers during the year. Those are two different products. Expecting the tax work to give you the monthly numbers is the most common reporting mistake in this industry.
WHAT BREAKS AT EACH CADENCE.
At quarterly, every job review is a post mortem
Say a job starts overrunning in week three. You can see it in the cost report as soon as the books are current, and you can't see it before that. On a quarterly cadence you find it in month four. The crew has finished, and all you can do is price the next job better. You could have corrected the overrun for eleven weeks, and nobody in the business had the numbers to do it.
At quarterly, overbilling reads as profit for two months
When you bill ahead of cost, the P&L looks strong and the job owes work it has already been paid for. A monthly WIP reconciliation catches it as a WIP adjustment. A quarterly one lets it build across two closes. That's long enough for you to take a distribution, price a bid, or hire somebody off a number that was never earned. Profit fade at closeout is usually this, found late.
At whenever the CPA asks, there's no bank package and no forecast
You can't build a 13 week cash forecast from books nobody has entered. You can't produce a WIP schedule for a period nobody closed. And when a lender or a surety asks for monthly financials, you can't give them something that doesn't exist. So credit conversations get postponed, bonding stays capped, and prequalification forms go back incomplete. All of that comes from when the books get done.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN DOLLARS.
Take a $600,000 job with $480,000 of budgeted cost. It's 12 percent over on cost, which is $57,600 if nobody corrects it before the end. Caught at 25 percent complete, $14,400 of it is already spent and $43,200 is still preventable. Caught at 80 percent complete, $46,080 is spent and $11,520 is left to protect. It's the same job and the same overrun. The reporting cadence decided which of those two numbers the business kept.
With books closed by the tenth, a decision made on the eleventh uses transactions between eleven and forty one days old. Close quarterly and the same decision uses transactions between eleven and a hundred and one days old. Both cadences produce accurate books. Only one of them produces books that describe the business you're operating this week.
THE CADENCE WE KEEP FOR CLIENTS.
Transactions are entered weekly, the receivables aging is reviewed weekly, and the cash forecast is updated from current data. The reason is math. A month entered weekly closes in days. A month entered at the end takes longer than the window allows. Weekly entry is what makes the tenth possible.
Cutoff, bank reconciliations, the WIP reconciliation, and a fixed set of numbers are done by the tenth of the following month, whether the month was busy or not. The WIP schedule, the cost to complete, the CEO report, and the forecast all use that close. If the close date moves, every report behind it moves with it.
The forecast works from entries that are days old. That's the only way it predicts anything. Built on books that are months old, it looks like a forecast and it's a guess. This is the report you make decisions from, and it's the first one that stops working when the entry falls behind.
When you keep the cadence, your return is filed from books that closed twelve times during the year. That makes your CPA's job cheaper and faster, and it ends the annual argument about which number is right. The tax work stays with your CPA, where it belongs. They get closed books to work from.
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. We don't bill by the hour, and we don't do payroll. The one-time onboarding fee is in the table.
Built for subs doing $1M to $12M. Above $12.5M we quote.
| Last 12 months revenue | Core | Strategic | Platinum | One-time onboarding |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under $1M | $1,900 | $3,100 | $3,300 | $2,500 |
| $1M to $3.5M | $2,600 | $4,100 | $5,300 | $4,500 |
| $3.5M to $6.5M | $3,800 | $5,900 | $8,300 | $6,000 |
| $6.5M to $9.5M | $5,100 | $7,600 | $11,800 | $7,500 |
| $9.5M to $12.5M | $6,100 | $8,900 | $14,900 | $9,000 |
| Above $12.5M | Quoted | Quoted | Quoted | Quoted |
The onboarding fee covers migrating your books back to the start of your last taxable year and getting you fully operational in 60 days. It's billed once, with your first invoice. It's the same for all three tiers, and it moves with your revenue band. Your first month is prorated, and your monthly engagement starts on the first of the first full month.
Just want the setup? Onboarding only is the same onboarding work with no monthly service after it, one time, at the onboarding fee plus $2,000. Start a monthly engagement later and $2,000 counts toward it. It starts at $4,500, and the price for every band is on the pricing page.
The three tier columns are the whole price. Which one fits depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. No payroll. No hidden line items. The onboarding fee is right here in the table.
- Online software only: QuickBooks, Sage, Viewpoint and similar. No VPN or hosted desktop.
- Not in any tier: payroll, pay applications, collections on receivables.
- Pricing valid through 2027.
CFO work. Your own bookkeeper keeps doing the books.
We build your plan every month. Your team does the work.
You get the CFO work: job costing built to match the way you estimate, a 13 week cash forecast, WIP every month, and a monthly meeting that ends with decisions.
Your bookkeeper still does the books.
Core, plus bookkeeping and bank reconciliations, plus job costing and WIP software set up and managed for you. Use your own online accounting software or we supply it, one price.
We build the plan, track it and adjust it every month.
We only work with trade subcontractors. We know what to look for, and we fix problems while they're still small. Everything in Core, plus the bookkeeping and bank reconciliations done for you, and the job costing and WIP software set up, loaded with your cost codes, and managed every month. Use your own online software, or move to ours and we pay for it.
Our team does the bookkeeping and the reconciliations. We don't do payroll.
Strategic, plus a controller who handles payables and receivables the way an in-house controller would. You approve every payment.
We manage the money side for you, every week.
Everything in Strategic, plus our team does the controller work. We handle your bills and receivables the way an in-house controller would: we call vendors, pay the bills and keep the accounting current. We plan the cash flow first, and you approve every payment because it is your money.
Our team does the payables and receivables. We don't do payroll, pay applications or collections.
FREQUENTLY ASKED.
