Our construction accounting services give contractors in Grand Rapids and across West Michigan books that report job by job — job costing, work-in-progress schedules, retainage, and contractor tax planning, handled directly by a CPA with 28+ years of experience.
A contractor's books have a second dimension a retail or service business never has: the job. Revenue arrives in draws, costs land weeks after the work, and a job can be profitable on paper while the bank account says otherwise. Everything below exists to close that gap.
Mindy handles the work directly, as a licensed CPA — the same person who reviews your job costs also prepares and signs your return.
Book Your Free ConsultationMost accounting systems answer one question: how did the business do last month? That question is close to useless to a contractor. Your March was fine, but the Ottawa County remodel lost $9,000 in labor overruns while a smaller job carried the month — and a monthly P&L will never tell you that. It nets the two together and reports peace.
Job costing is the fix. Every hour, invoice, delivery ticket and subcontractor bill is coded to a specific job before it is filed, so each job carries its own profit and loss. You find the overrun in week three, while there is still a change order to write — not in February, when your accountant is reconstructing it from a shoebox.
Work-in-progress reporting is the second half. On any job that spans month-end, what you have billed and what you have earned are different numbers. A WIP schedule reconciles them and tells you whether each job is over-billed (you are holding the customer's money and it will run out) or under-billed (you are financing the job yourself). Over-billing is the more dangerous of the two, because it looks exactly like a healthy bank balance right up until the last draw.
Then there is retainage — the 5–10% held back on each draw until closeout. Left inside accounts receivable it inflates what looks collectible and hides how much of your capital is parked in finished work. We keep it on its own line so you can see the total across every job at once.
None of this is exotic. It is simply what construction accounting services do that general bookkeeping does not, and it is why a contractor's books need to be built for the job, not adapted to it after the fact.
Trades and construction make up the largest share of our client base. Most come to us running a real business on books built for a much simpler one.
Running multiple jobs and multiple subs at once, where draw schedules, retainage and sub payments all have to reconcile before anyone knows what a job actually earned.
Electrical, plumbing, HVAC, roofing, drywall and concrete crews — where labor is the biggest cost and small estimating errors repeat across every job until someone measures them.
Long jobs, heavy change-order traffic, and allowances that quietly move the budget — the projects where percentage-of-completion reporting earns its keep.
Equipment-heavy operations where depreciation, financing, fuel and machine time have to be allocated to jobs before margin means anything.
One- and two-crew operations where the owner is still on the tools, quarterly estimates keep sneaking up, and there is no back office to catch anything.
The transactions are entered correctly and the books still cannot answer "did we make money on that job?" — the point at which construction accounting, not more bookkeeping, is what is missing.
Michigan no longer follows the federal depreciation rules. The state has decoupled from the current federal bonus depreciation and Section 179 expensing amounts, so a single equipment purchase can produce one deduction on your federal return and a materially smaller one on your Michigan return — with an addback to reconcile them. For an excavation or trucking-heavy contractor buying equipment, that difference is not a rounding error, and it changes when it is worth buying. We calculate both, rather than assuming the federal answer carries over.
Sales and use tax rarely works the way contractors expect. In Michigan a contractor is generally treated as the consumer of the materials affixed to real property — meaning use tax is owed on those materials rather than sales tax being collected from the customer. The treatment shifts for certain contracts, exempt customers, and equipment versus fixtures, and Michigan Treasury's guidance in this area is updated more often than most contractors realize. Getting it wrong is usually discovered in an audit, with interest attached. Treasury publishes the current rules under business sales and use tax.
Worker classification is the audit that hurts most. Paying a long-term crew member as a 1099 subcontractor when the working relationship looks like employment exposes you to back payroll taxes, penalties and interest across every year it happened. We review classification as part of onboarding, before it compounds — and we file the 1099-NECs for the subs who genuinely are subs.
City income tax follows the crew, not the office. Grand Rapids and Walker both levy a city income tax, and it can reach work performed inside those cities by employees based elsewhere. Contractors working across West Michigan are the businesses most likely to trip over it.
On longer contracts, the federal side has its own trap: jobs reported under percentage-of-completion can require a look-back interest calculation once the contract closes, on IRS Form 8697. It is the kind of filing that is easy to miss entirely when nobody is watching the contract dates.
Plenty of firms will job-cost your books. Far fewer can also sign the return that comes out of them — or tell you, in November, what to do about it.
A licensed CPA and MICPA member reviews your job costs personally. No junior staff, no ticket queue, no callback from someone who has never seen your jobs.
Your job costing, payroll, and business and personal returns are handled by the same CPA — so a depreciation or classification decision is made once, not argued between two firms in March.
Equipment purchases, hiring, entity elections and bidding questions get answered while you can still act on them — not reported back to you after the year has closed.
4K prepares financial statements for management and tax purposes. If your surety or your bank requires a formal reviewed or audited statement for bonding, that is attest work and we will refer you to a firm that performs it. Many residential builders, remodelers and subcontractors never need one. If you do, the job-cost and WIP discipline we build makes that engagement faster and cheaper, because the records are already in order.
Five-star reviews on Google from the owners Mindy works with directly.
"Mindy is great. I am so happy that I have someone I can trust to have my business's best interest in mind. She is very professional and goes above and beyond. I knew from the initial meeting that Mindy was going to be someone who would be awesome to work with."
"I had a complicated problem with my state unemployment taxes. I turned the problem over to these experts and they fixed a 20-thousand-dollar problem. We highly recommend this company! They are professional and know their stuff!"
"Mindy does an excellent job of explaining accounting and tax terms in a way that I can understand. As a small business owner, that helps me to make better financial decisions. I cannot imagine doing all my own accounting and am grateful to be working with someone I know I can trust."
Pricing depends on job volume, crew size, and how much reporting and advisory you need — agreed before any work starts, so a busy season never produces a surprise invoice. You get a specific number at your free consultation.
A construction accountant reports your business one job at a time instead of one month at a time. That means costing every job separately (labor, materials, equipment and subcontractors), tracking work in progress so you can see whether a job is over- or under-billed, following retainage that is earned but not yet paid, and turning all of it into financial statements and a tax return. A general accountant tells you the business made money last month. A construction accountant tells you which jobs made it and which quietly lost it.
Most contractors use job costing on top of accrual accounting, and recognize revenue on longer contracts using the percentage-of-completion method — booking revenue as the work is actually performed rather than when the job finishes. Smaller contractors and shorter jobs may use the completed-contract method or, in limited cases, cash basis. The right combination depends on your contract lengths, your revenue and your entity type, and it can differ between your books and your tax return. That choice is worth making deliberately with a CPA rather than inheriting it from whatever the software defaulted to.
For most small and mid-sized contractors, yes — QuickBooks Online handles job costing well once the chart of accounts and the item list are built around your jobs rather than left at the defaults. That setup is where it usually goes wrong: costs land in generic expense accounts, jobs are not tagged, and the job-profitability reports come out empty or misleading. We work in QuickBooks Online and Xero, and we build the structure first so the job reports mean something. Very large or heavily bonded contractors may eventually outgrow both.
Start by making the job the unit of record: every invoice, receipt, timesheet and subcontractor bill gets coded to a specific job before it is filed. Reconcile bank and credit card accounts monthly, keep retainage in its own account rather than buried in receivables, track change orders as they are approved instead of at year end, and review committed costs against the budget while the job is still running. Done consistently, that is what makes job costing, work-in-progress reporting and a clean tax return possible. Our bookkeeping services cover the day-to-day side of exactly this.
Hourly rates vary widely by region and by the complexity of the work, which is why we don't quote construction accounting by the hour. Contractors get a flat monthly fee based on job volume, crew size and how much reporting and advisory you need, agreed before any work starts. We break down what actually drives pricing in our guide to CPA costs in Michigan, and you get a specific number for your business at your free consultation.
No — and it's worth knowing before you call. 4K prepares financial statements for management and tax purposes. If your surety or your bank requires a formal reviewed or audited statement, that is attest work, and we refer you to a firm that performs it. Many smaller contractors, subcontractors and residential builders never need one. If you do need bonding-grade statements, the job costing and work-in-progress discipline we build still makes that engagement cheaper and faster, because the underlying records are already in order.
Our core CPA-led monthly accounting for Grand Rapids small businesses — financial statements, reporting and advisory across every industry.
Crew payroll, worker classification review and 1099-NEC filing for contractors running employees and subs side by side.
Equipment timing, depreciation and entity decisions worked out before year end — while you can still change the answer.
The day-to-day layer underneath job costing — coding, reconciliation and QuickBooks Online support, reviewed by a CPA.
Federal and Michigan returns for contractor LLCs, S-corps and partnerships, prepared from the same books we maintain.
Where we work across Grand Rapids, Walker, Wyoming, Grandville, Kentwood and the wider West Michigan area.
We work with the tools you already use
Acuity Scheduling
CPACharge
MICPA