HOW OFTEN THE BOOKS HAVE TO BE DONE.
Transactions get entered weekly and the books close by the tenth of the following month. That's the cadence a construction business needs, and the reason is that every forward looking tool a subcontractor owns reads off closed books. At quarterly, the WIP schedule is stale enough that a cost to complete becomes an estimate of an estimate, overbilling reads as profit for two months before anybody catches it, and a job that started losing money in week three is discovered when it's nearly finished. At whenever the CPA asks, the profit and loss becomes a tax document and stops being a management report entirely, because nothing in it can be acted on. The work is the same amount of work at every cadence. What changes is whether it reaches you in time to change an outcome.
Owners resist the calendar because the cost of a slower cadence never appears as a line item. There's no invoice for the job you could have corrected at 25 percent complete and caught at 80. There's no charge for the quarter you priced work off a report that turned out to be a collections summary. The whole cost of doing the books late is paid in decisions, which is why it survives so long in businesses that are otherwise well run.
WHAT IT MEANS.
Bookkeeping frequency is how often transactions are entered and reconciled, and it sets a ceiling on how current every report built from them can possibly be.
Two habits carry this and they're different jobs. Weekly is maintenance: transactions entered, the receivables aging looked at, and the cash forecast updated from current data. Monthly is the close: cutoff, bank reconciliations, the WIP reconciliation, and a locked set of numbers by the tenth. Neither one substitutes for the other. Weekly entry with no close produces current data nobody has verified, and a monthly close with no weekly entry produces a close that takes three weeks and finishes too late to use.
There's a real difference between a bookkeeping engagement and a tax engagement, and it's worth being clear about because both are legitimate. A CPA filing a return needs the year to be complete and correct, and by definition that work happens after the year is over. A construction business making decisions needs numbers during the year. Those are two different products, and expecting the first one to deliver the second is the most common reporting mistake in this industry.
WHAT BREAKS AT EACH CADENCE.
At quarterly, every job review is a post mortem
A job that starts overrunning in week three is visible in the cost report as soon as the books are current, and invisible until then. On a quarterly cadence the discovery happens in month four, when the crew has finished and the only remaining option is to price the next job better. The overrun was correctable for eleven weeks and nobody in the business had the information to correct it.
At quarterly, overbilling reads as profit for two months
Billing ahead of cost produces a P&L that looks strong and a job that owes work it has already been paid for. A monthly WIP reconciliation catches it as a WIP adjustment. A quarterly one lets it accumulate across two closes, which is long enough for an owner to take a distribution, price a bid, or hire somebody off a number that was never earned. Profit fade at closeout is usually just this, discovered late.
At whenever the CPA asks, there's no bank package and no forecast
A 13 week cash forecast can't be built from books nobody has entered, a WIP schedule can't be produced for a period nobody closed, and a lender or a surety asking for monthly financials can't be given something that doesn't exist. So credit conversations get postponed, bonding stays capped, and prequalification forms go back incomplete. None of that's a capability problem. It's a calendar problem.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN DOLLARS.
Take a $600,000 job with $480,000 of budgeted cost, running 12 percent over on cost, which is $57,600 if it runs unchecked to the end. Caught at 25 percent complete, $14,400 of it's already spent and $43,200 is still preventable. Caught at 80 percent complete, $46,080 is spent and $11,520 is left to protect. Same job, same overrun, and the cadence of the reporting 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 running this week.
THE CADENCE WE RUN FOR CLIENTS.
Transactions get entered weekly, the receivables aging gets reviewed weekly, and the cash forecast gets updated from current data rather than from last month's. The reason is arithmetic rather than discipline: a month entered weekly closes in days, and a month entered at the end takes longer than the window allows. Weekly is what makes the tenth possible at all.
Cutoff, bank reconciliations, the WIP reconciliation, and a locked set of numbers, done by the tenth of the following month whether the month was busy or not. Everything downstream reads off it: the WIP schedule, the cost to complete, the CEO report, and the forecast. A close date that moves is a close date that doesn't exist, because every report behind it moves with it.
The forecast runs on entries that are days old rather than months old, which is the only condition under which it predicts anything. Run against stale books it produces a document that looks like a forecast and functions as a hope. This is the tool that turns a cadence into a decision, and it's the first thing that stops working when the entry slips.
The by-product of running the cadence is that the return gets filed from a set of books that closed twelve times rather than once. That makes your CPA's job cheaper and faster, and it removes the annual argument about which number is right. The tax work stays with your CPA, where it belongs. What changes is what they get 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. No hourly billing, no payroll, and no add-ons.
Pricing
| 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 rather than a report.
Your bookkeeper keeps doing the books.
You stop touching the books.
Everything in Core, and we run the bookkeeping and the controllership as well. Nobody in your office is answering coding questions or chasing a reconciliation at month end.
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 job costing.
FREQUENTLY ASKED.
