Job costing, draws, subs, and 1099s — handled by someone who spent years running construction and roofing operations, not a bookkeeper learning your industry from a textbook. We keep your books organized job by job so you know what you actually made on every project.
Most bookkeepers treat a construction company like any other small business: money in, money out, one big P&L. That's how contractors end up profitable on paper and broke in the bank account. AJM Consulting builds your books around the thing that actually matters — the job.
Our founder spent years running construction and roofing operations before starting this practice — managing crews, pricing bids, chasing draws, and watching job costs eat margins in real time. When you say "retainage," "change order," or "the sub still hasn't sent his W-9," we don't need it explained. That operating experience is the difference between a bookkeeper who codes your transactions and one who understands why the job, not the month, is the unit that matters in your business.
The core of what we do is job costing: tracking the income and every cost — labor, materials, subcontractors, equipment, permits — against the specific job it belongs to. Company-wide totals can look healthy while two or three jobs quietly bleed money. When costs land on the right job, you can finally see which projects, which job types, and which customers made you money, and you can carry that knowledge into your next bid. If you want the full picture of how it works, we wrote a deeper guide on job costing for contractors.
We also keep the money side of long jobs sane. Progress billing and draw schedules get tracked so you always know what's been billed, what's been collected, and what's still owed on every open project. Front-loaded deposits get recorded so they don't masquerade as profit before the work is done, and retainage or holdbacks are tracked simply — so the five or ten percent sitting with the GC doesn't just vanish from your radar until you wonder why cash is tight.
Income and costs tracked per job — labor, materials, subs, equipment — so you know exactly which jobs made money.
Draw schedules, deposits, and retainage tracked per project so billed, collected, and outstanding are always clear.
Subcontractor payments tracked by job all year, W-9s organized, and 1099 season handled without the January scramble.
Material purchases coded to the right job; equipment, fuel, and vehicle costs kept separate and visible.
QuickBooks Online set up with a construction-friendly chart of accounts and project tracking — or restructured if it's a mess.
Shop rent, insurance, and office costs separated from job costs so your margins are real, not blended.
One of the most common problems we see in contractor books is overhead blended into job costs — or worse, job costs blended into overhead. Your shop rent, general liability insurance, office costs, and the truck that serves every job are not the same thing as the lumber package for the Miller job, and your books should say so. When overhead is separated cleanly, you can see your true gross margin per job and know how much every job needs to contribute just to keep the lights on.
Then there's cash flow, which in construction has its own physics. Long jobs mean money arrives in lumps — a deposit up front, draws along the way, a final payment that may trail the punch list by weeks — while payroll, materials, and fuel go out every single week. We keep your cash picture current across all open jobs, so a big deposit reads as what it is: work you still owe, not money you get to spend twice.
We also make sure the everyday costs that nickel-and-dime a trade business — equipment, repairs, fuel, vehicle costs, small tools — are captured consistently. Individually they're small; over a year they're often the difference between the margin you think you're making and the one you actually are.
Plenty of contractors come to us mid-season with months of unreconciled accounts, a shoebox of receipts behind the truck seat, and a QuickBooks file that hasn't matched the bank since spring. No judgment — you were building. We'll catch the books up, sort transactions onto the right jobs where the trail still exists, reconcile every account, and put a simple monthly rhythm in place so it doesn't pile up again. If you're not sure whether you need a cleanup or ongoing monthly work, our bookkeeping services page lays out how both engagements work.
Most bookkeepers who advertise "construction experience" mean they once had a contractor as a client. Ours is different: before AJM Consulting existed, our founder ran construction and roofing operations — hiring and scheduling crews, pricing bids and living with the ones that were wrong, managing draw schedules, and watching what materials, fuel, and callbacks really do to a margin. The books we build for contractors come from that side of the table.
Practically, that means your chart of accounts reflects how a job actually flows, your reports answer the question you're really asking — did that job make money, and why? — and conversations with your bookkeeper don't start with a vocabulary lesson. You work directly with a consultant in Kalispell who picks up the phone, not a ticket queue.
Contractors and trades are a specialty, not the whole story. We build industry-specific books for the businesses that keep the Flathead Valley running.
Free 30-minute consultation. No pressure, no commitment — just a real conversation about your jobs, your books, and what it would take to get clear numbers on both.