Job costing, WIP, and the multiple prime structure state work is bid under
Win a public building job in Albany and you may find there is no general contractor. New York requires plumbing, HVAC and electrical to be bid as separate prime contracts once the work passes five hundred thousand dollars in Albany County, so several primes each hold their own contract with the agency and each bill it directly. Nobody is coordinating the schedule on your behalf, nobody is carrying your cash, and every day lost waiting on another prime lands in your overhead unless the job costing catches it. Then payment runs on the state's statutory clock rather than yours. We build books that survive both.
On the ground
Empire State Plaza, Albany, New York
The Capital Region works for the state more than it works for developers, and public owners buy construction in a shape that ordinary contractor accounting was never built to record.
They didn’t just record transactions and call it a day. They built a custom chart of accounts around how a remodeling company actually runs, did a full catch-up on years of bookkeeping inside QuickBooks Online, and now stay on top of my monthly bookkeeping and payroll. Every step, they broke it down in simple terms instead of burying me in accountant talk.
FinTruction rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up, with real job costing, work in progress, and retainage. They didn’t just hand me reports and disappear; they walked me through my numbers until I understood them.
Sahil and his team handle the bookkeeping and job costing for my painting business. They cleaned up my books and set up integrations that give me accurate, timely job costing with solid weekly data. Reliable, detailed, and genuinely invested in getting the numbers right.
FinTruction is the only bookkeeping team we’ve found that truly understands construction accounting and WIP reporting. They aligned our income and costs across 21 jobs and gave us full, monthly transparency. Fast, accurate, and an indispensable partner.
When I came to FinTruction I had no financial structure. No job costing, no WIP tracking, books behind. They did a full cleanup and rebuilt job costing and WIP tracking in QuickBooks. Now I know what’s billed, what’s owed, and where every job stands.
A couple of minutes from a contractor we support, sharing what working with FinTruction has been like and what changed once their numbers finally made sense.
A general bookkeeper can record transactions. Construction accounting is a different job.
| What you need | Generic local bookkeeper | FinTruction |
|---|---|---|
| Job-level costing | Lumps all jobs into one P&L | Cost codes and margin per project |
| WIP & revenue recognition | Cash-basis, no WIP schedule | Monthly WIP with over/underbilling |
| Retainage tracking | Buried in AR/AP, often missed | Tracked receivable & payable by contract |
| Bonding & lender packages | Not equipped to produce them | Bonding-ready statements and backlog |
| Construction software | QuickBooks set up like a retail shop | QuickBooks + integrations tuned for contractors |
We support contractors across Albany, Rensselaer, Schenectady and Saratoga counties, from the mechanical and electrical primes bidding agency work to the builders and specialty trades working campuses, hospitals and downtown conversions.
Running a Construction Company in Albany?
Get Your Free AuditOn a separate specification job you are a prime, not a sub, and the accounting has to reflect that. There is no general contractor's schedule to hide behind, no subcontract clause to route a delay through, and no one else's superintendent solving the sequencing. What you can do is measure it. Costed properly, waiting time becomes a documented number instead of a bad month.
Every construction platform claims to have a "QuickBooks integration." Most break the moment your books need to be accurate. Sales tax mismaps, retainage disappears, change orders create duplicates, and job costing reports stop matching project reality. We fix the integration so your software, your books, and your job‑level numbers all tell the same story.
Also work with Foundation, Sage 100, Bill.com, ADP, Gusto, Ramp, and more. See all platforms we integrate →
Public owners do not pay late at random. They pay on a statute, and they stop paying the moment a document is missing. State Finance Law section 179-f runs from receipt of a proper invoice, which means the date that matters is the one you can prove, and the exceptions run for as long as the problem takes to fix. Most of the delay contractors blame on the state is really a paperwork loop.
New York moved certified payroll to electronic submission to the Department of Labor on a thirty-day cycle, and it added a registry you have to be on before you bid. Both are now bid prerequisites rather than back-office chores, and both apply to every sub you carry. We run them as a standing process instead of a scramble the week a requisition is due.
Agency work is bonded work, and the surety decides how much of it you get to chase. We prepare a monthly work in progress schedule comparing cost to date against the current estimate, calculate earned revenue on percentage of completion, and surface over and underbilling by job while there is still a month left to fix it rather than a footnote to explain it.
A book of business made mostly of public owners is stable revenue and slow cash at the same time, and those two things pull in opposite directions. Our controller services and CFO services cover how much agency work your working capital can actually float, and our construction tax planning ties the same numbers to the return.
Most construction markets are shaped by developers. Albany is shaped by owners who never sell anything. The state is here, and so is the machinery that buys buildings for it: the Office of General Services running state facility work, the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York building for public and independent colleges, not-for-profit healthcare and the courts, and the SUNY campuses on their own capital cycles. DASNY describes itself as the largest government building construction agency in the country, and its head office is in this city.
Being close to that is genuinely an advantage. Public capital does not stop because interest rates moved, the pipeline is published rather than rumored, and an agency that liked your last job tends to see you on the next one. It is also the reason a Capital Region contractor can be busy and broke at the same time, because the same owners that never cancel also never pay early.
The delivery shape is the part outsiders miss. New York does not let a public owner in Albany County hand a five hundred thousand dollar building project to one general contractor and walk away. Plumbing, heating and ventilating, and electrical work have to be separately specified and separately bid, so the mechanical, electrical and plumbing houses in this market are not subcontractors on that job, they are primes. That changes who your customer is, who owes you money, who is responsible when the sequence slips, and what your books have to be able to prove.
Around the agency work sits the rest of it: the research campus on Fuller Road that has made semiconductor and cleanroom construction a local specialty, Albany Med and the regional healthcare systems, laboratory fit-outs, and a downtown and Hudson waterfront full of nineteenth and early twentieth century stock being converted to something else. Different owners, different rules, frequently the same crew in the same week. If your job costing cannot tell an agency prime contract apart from a private fit-out, you are averaging two businesses together and calling the result a margin.
Separate Specifications and Multiple Prime Contracts: State Finance Law section 135 governs building work for the state and General Municipal Law section 101 governs work for political subdivisions, and both require the owner to prepare separate specifications for three subdivisions of the work: plumbing and gas fitting; steam heating, hot water heating, ventilating and air conditioning apparatus; and electric wiring and standard illuminating fixtures. The specifications must permit separate and independent bidding on each. The thresholds are regional: three million dollars in Bronx, Kings, New York, Queens and Richmond counties, one and a half million in Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester, and five hundred thousand dollars in the rest of the state, Albany County included. Confirm the figure that governs your own contract, because the amounts have been amended before.
What Multiple Prime Delivery Does to a Contractor's Books: The statutes are procurement rules, but the consequence is an accounting one. You hold a contract with the owner rather than with a general contractor, so there is no subcontract mechanism carrying coordination, sequencing or another party's delay. Standby time, remobilization and extended general conditions are still real costs, and the only way they ever become recoverable, or even visible, is if they were costed as they happened. General Municipal Law section 101 also applies except as otherwise provided in Labor Law section 222, dealing with project labor agreements, so the delivery structure is something to read out of the bid documents rather than assume.
Prompt Payment, State Finance Law Section 179-f: The required payment date for a state agency is thirty calendar days, excluding legal holidays, after receipt of the invoice, and fifteen calendar days for a small business. Interest accrues on the amount due if the agency misses it, subject to exceptions including liens and interest amounts under ten dollars. The extensions are where the real cash timing lives. Where the State Comptroller determines there is reasonable cause to believe payment may not properly be due, the deadline extends by however long the issue takes to satisfy, and final payment on highway construction contracts runs on a seventy-five day period that extends further if the contractor has not submitted required documentation.
NYSDOL Public Work Contractor Registry, Labor Law 220-i: Effective December 30, 2024, contractors and subcontractors must register with the New York State Department of Labor before bidding on or performing public work, and the requirement extends to private projects covered by Article 8. Registration runs through the department online portal with a non-refundable two hundred dollar application fee. Bidding while knowingly unregistered, or allowing an unregistered sub to start work, carries a fine of up to one thousand dollars. For a contractor whose backlog is mostly agency work, registration status is a prequalification item for the whole subcontractor list, not a form somebody files once.
Electronic Certified Payroll, Labor Law 220-j: Certified payroll on Article 8 covered work goes to the Department of Labor electronically, with submissions required starting January 1, 2026 for covered work performed in 2026 and after, and records due every thirty days from the project start date. A department of jurisdiction can still impose its own contractual reporting on top of the state submission. The practical shift is that certified payroll stops being a document you assemble when someone asks and becomes an output your payroll system has to produce on a calendar, across every covered contract you hold at once.
Lien Law Article 3-A and MWBE Reporting: Funds received on a New York construction contract are trust assets, and section 75 requires the trustee to keep books or records for each trust, including an allocation record where several trusts share one bank account. Failure to keep them is presumptive evidence that trust funds were applied outside the trust, which turns a bookkeeping failure into personal exposure. Separately, state agency contracts commonly carry project-specific Minority and Women-Owned Business Enterprise participation goals, and you report subcontractor payments against them. Both are straightforward if the accounting was set up to tag payments at the time; both are miserable to reconstruct.
A fair question if you already have a bookkeeper, or a CPA who does the return in March. Here is the honest answer.
Contractors who were behind, off the bank, or heading into an audit. Same work, different trades.
$1M+ Rebuild
"FinTruction rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up, with real job costing, WIP, and retainage."
Built From Scratch
"FinTruction set the accounts up properly first, then cleaned up everything I never entered."
Most Albany contractors do not need new software. They need what they already pay for configured for construction, so a prime contract, a trust balance and a real job margin are all visible without a second system and a spreadsheet.
Most QuickBooks files we inherit were configured for a business that sells products. For a contractor that means jobs are customers, cost codes do not exist, retainage hides inside receivables, and nothing in the file records which contracts are public work, which hours were spent waiting on another prime, or how much of the cash on hand is trust money.
Is your QuickBooks file working against you?
If your project managers already track budgets, commitments and change orders in a construction platform, the office should not be typing it in again. We connect the field system to the accounting so the numbers agree and the month does not open with an argument about whose figure is right.
One set of numbers that the field and the office both believe.
Once the systems are connected, reporting stops being a history lesson. These are the reports Capital Region contractors use to decide what to chase and what to walk away from:
See how we have done this for other contractors in our construction accounting case studies.
Because New York makes the owner do it. State Finance Law section 135 covers building work for the state, and General Municipal Law section 101 covers work for political subdivisions such as a city, county or school district. Both require the owner to prepare separate specifications for three subdivisions of the work: plumbing and gas fitting; steam heating, hot water heating, ventilating and air conditioning apparatus; and electric wiring and standard illuminating fixtures. The specifications have to permit separate and independent bidding on each. The practical result is that the mechanical, electrical and plumbing scopes are awarded as their own prime contracts alongside the general work, so nobody sits above you holding the whole job together.
The threshold is regional. Both statutes set it at three million dollars in Bronx, Kings, New York, Queens and Richmond counties, one and a half million dollars in Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester, and five hundred thousand dollars in every other county in the state. Albany County falls in that last group, so a five hundred thousand dollar building project here already trips the separate specification requirement, while the same job downstate would not. Thresholds do get amended, so confirm the figure that governs your particular contract before you price around it, but the point stands: the trigger point in the Capital Region is low.
You bill the owner directly instead of billing a general contractor, which sounds like an improvement and often is. What changes underneath is that there is no general contractor absorbing coordination, sequencing or the cost of somebody else being late. If the electrical prime is three weeks behind, your crew still shows up, still burns hours and still eats extended general conditions, and there is no subcontract clause routing that back to anyone. Unless your job costing separates your own base scope from time spent waiting on or working around another prime, the loss disappears into overhead and you find out at year end.
State Finance Law section 179-f sets a required payment date of thirty calendar days, excluding legal holidays, after receipt of the invoice, and fifteen calendar days for a small business. Miss that and interest accrues on the amount due, subject to exceptions such as liens or an interest amount under ten dollars. The exceptions matter more than the headline. Where the State Comptroller determines there is reasonable cause to believe payment may not properly be due, the clock extends by however long it takes to resolve. Final payment on highway construction contracts runs on a seventy-five day period and can extend further if your documentation is not in.
It can. General Municipal Law section 101 applies except as otherwise provided in Labor Law section 222, which deals with project labor agreements, so a job running under a PLA may not be structured as separate primes at all. That is not a detail to assume either way. Read the bid documents and the contract, because the delivery structure determines who you are actually contracting with, who coordinates the schedule, and whose paper your payment application has to travel through. We look at that before the job is opened in the accounting system, not after the first requisition bounces.
Yes. Labor Law section 220-i created a public work contractor and subcontractor registry at the New York State Department of Labor, effective December 30, 2024. Contractors and subcontractors must be registered before submitting a bid or beginning work on public work, and the requirement also reaches private projects covered by Article 8. Registration runs through the department online portal with a non-refundable application fee of two hundred dollars, and bidding while unregistered, or letting an unregistered sub start, carries a fine of up to one thousand dollars. In a market this dependent on agency work, registration status belongs on your bid checklist.
Electronically, on a schedule. Labor Law section 220-j requires contractors and subcontractors on Article 8 covered work to submit certified payroll records electronically to the Department of Labor, with submissions required starting January 1, 2026 for covered work performed in 2026 and after. Records go in every thirty days from the project start date. A department of jurisdiction can still impose its own contractual reporting on top of that. If your payroll system produces a clean file only when somebody spends a day rekeying it, that is a system problem, and on a portfolio of state jobs it becomes a monthly one.
More than most contractors expect. Funds you receive on a New York construction contract are trust assets, and section 75 puts the recordkeeping duty on you as trustee, including a record showing the allocation to each trust where several trusts share a bank account. The consequence is the part that catches people: failing to keep those books or records is presumptive evidence that trust funds were applied outside the trust. That is a direct line from sloppy bookkeeping to personal exposure for principals, which is why we treat the trust record as a monthly close item rather than something to reconstruct if a claim ever arrives.
Yes, and that is most of what the Capital Region runs on. The Dormitory Authority of the State of New York builds for public and independent colleges, not-for-profit healthcare and court facilities, and describes itself as the largest government building construction agency in the country. Add the Office of General Services managing state facility work, the SUNY campuses, Albany Med and the research campus on Fuller Road, and you get an owner base that documents everything. The accounting requirement is not exotic, it is just unforgiving: cost detail by phase, payment applications that reconcile, MWBE participation reported against the goal, and payroll that stands up.
Start with the free Audit. Send your current file and your last WIP or job profitability report and we will tell you what is wrong, what it is costing you, and whether your public work documentation would hold up if an agency asked. No obligation. After that it is a flat monthly fee based on transaction volume, active jobs and reporting needs, so asking a question does not start a clock. Sahil Ahmad, CPA reviews the work. We are fully remote, so Capital Region contractors get construction-specific accounting without paying toward an office nobody visits.
FinTruction provides construction accounting across New York. Select your city below for job costing, WIP and contractor bookkeeping support in your market.
If the contract structure is already understood and it is the close that keeps slipping, we also run day-to-day construction bookkeeping: cost-code coding, reconciliations, AP and AR, and job-cost entry every month.
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