Built for contractors working occupied buildings and a home rule tax code
Work inside a live hospital on the Anschutz Medical Campus and the job is not just concrete and drywall. Before the first wall comes down you are building containment barriers, running HEPA-filtered negative air machines, holding an infection control permit, and doing half the scope at night around patients who cannot be moved. Those are real costs, and on most Aurora, Colorado job cost reports they vanish into general conditions. Then the margin comes in thin and nobody can say why. We cost this work the way it is actually built, by ICRA class and by phase, so occupied-building jobs stop quietly subsidizing everything else.
On the ground
Aurora Municipal Center, Aurora, Colorado
This is the service Aurora contractors most often do not have. Work in a hospital, a clinic or a research building carries a whole cost layer that ordinary job costing has no home for, and it is the layer that decides whether the job made money. We build the structure first, then the reporting follows.
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 →
Aurora takes its tax on construction materials up front, at permit, based on an estimate. Most contractors expense that deposit on day one and never look at it again, which means the reconciliation never gets filed and the refund window closes. We treat the deposit as what it is: money sitting with the city against a job that is not finished.
Campus work runs long and gets released in pieces, which is exactly the shape of job where underbillings hide. An underbilling is money you have already spent and not yet asked for. We produce a monthly work in progress schedule that compares cost to date with the current estimate and shows the position by job while there is still time to bill differently.
Buckley Space Force Base and the Rocky Mountain Regional VA Medical Center put federal wage rules inside the city limits, and Colorado adds its own prevailing wage layer on qualifying state agency projects. The first covered job is where a payroll process that worked for fifteen years suddenly does not.
Contractors who break into campus and institutional work usually find their old cash cycle no longer fits. Longer contracts, larger retainage balances, slower approvals and a bigger payroll all arrive together. Our controller services and CFO services put a monthly conversation around what you can carry and what it costs to carry it.
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.
Aurora is not a bedroom suburb of Denver in economic terms. It is the third largest city in Colorado, it has its own home rule tax code, and its two biggest anchors are an academic medical campus and a Space Force base. Both of those pay well and both of them cost more to build in than a generic job cost system can see.
Aurora gets described as a Denver suburb, and for a contractor that description is misleading. It is the third largest city in Colorado in its own right, it spreads across Arapahoe and Adams counties with a corner in Douglas, and it sets its own tax and permitting rules as a home rule municipality. The work here does not follow downtown Denver, it follows two anchors that sit inside the city limits.
The first is the Anschutz Medical Campus, where the University of Colorado health sciences schools sit alongside UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital, Children's Hospital Colorado and the Rocky Mountain Regional VA Medical Center. That is a permanent construction economy rather than a project: research buildings, clinical fit-outs, imaging suites, utility upgrades and a constant stream of renovation inside buildings that never close. Very little of it is greenfield, and that is the whole financial story.
The second is Buckley Space Force Base, on the other side of the city, which brings federal contracting rules to a market otherwise dominated by private and institutional owners. Around both, Aurora keeps growing outward toward the airport corridor with housing, hotels near the Gaylord Rockies resort, distribution space and the roads and utilities that follow. A single mid-sized contractor here can easily be running a hospital renovation, a federally funded job and a subdivision in the same month.
Those three types of work have three different cost shapes, three different payment rhythms and three different compliance regimes, and they are usually all running through one chart of accounts that was set up for none of them. That is why margin here so often turns out to be an average rather than a fact: the healthcare work is carrying costs nobody coded, and something else in the portfolio is getting the credit.
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 work with contractors across the east metro, from mechanical and electrical crews who live on the medical campuses to the site and residential builders working the growth edge out toward the airport.
Running a Construction Company in Aurora?
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Aurora Building Use Tax, Collected Before You Start: Aurora is a home rule city and taxes construction materials itself. Before the permit is issued the city collects a use tax deposit at the city rate, currently 3.75 percent, and 4.00 percent where the Arapahoe County quarter point applies, computed either on your estimate of materials and fixtures or, at minimum, on 50 percent of the permit valuation set by the building division. It is a deposit, not a final figure. Under section 130-61 of the city code a project report showing actual liability is due no more than 90 days after the final certificate of occupancy or final inspection, and refund claims for overpayment must be submitted within one year of that date. Miss both and an overpayment simply becomes a donation.
Colorado Trust Fund Statute, C.R.S. 38-22-127: Money disbursed to a contractor or subcontractor on a construction contract is held in trust for the subcontractors, suppliers and laborers on that job. The statute requires separate records of account for each project or contract, and it expressly does not require a separate bank account, which means your job cost ledger is the compliance record. Violation is treated as theft under C.R.S. 18-4-401, which puts it beyond a bookkeeping argument. We keep project-level records that can show which receipts and which disbursements belonged to which job.
Retainage Limits, Public and Private: On covered public entity contracts, C.R.S. 24-91-103 caps retainage at 5 percent of the contract price and requires release within 60 days of final acceptance. On private commercial work, House Bill 21-1167 brought a 5 percent cap to private projects above 150,000 dollars, with single family homes and multifamily buildings of four units or fewer excluded. The accounting job is unchanged either way: retainage is not an ordinary receivable, and it should not be aging inside one. We track it receivable and payable, by contract, with the release condition attached.
Mechanic Lien Deadlines Run on Dates Your Books Hold: Colorado requires a notice of intent to be served on the owner and the principal contractor at least 10 days before a lien statement is recorded, and the lien statement itself must generally be recorded within four months of the last labor or materials furnished, with a shorter two month window for day or piece laborers. An action to enforce must be commenced within six months. We are not attorneys and we do not file notices. What we do is keep unpaid amounts organized by job, tier and date last furnished, so your attorney gets the backup the same day rather than a week later.
Two Prevailing Wage Regimes, Not One: Federally funded and federally assisted construction, which in Aurora includes work at Buckley Space Force Base and the VA medical center, falls under the Davis-Bacon Act with wage determinations and weekly certified payroll. Separately, Colorado law enacted through Senate Bill 19-196 requires prevailing wages paid at weekly intervals on public projects awarded by a state agency of government at 500,000 dollars or more, and the Keep Jobs in Colorado Act requires Colorado labor to perform at least 80 percent of the work on public works financed with state or local funds. Which regime applies is a contract-by-contract question, and getting it wrong shows up as withheld payment.
Licensing Is Local, Not Statewide: Colorado issues no statewide general contractor license. Aurora runs its own contractor licensing, registration and permit program, while electricians and plumbers are licensed at state level through the Department of Regulatory Agencies. Contractors working across Aurora, Denver, Centennial and unincorporated county land carry several registrations at once. We book those fees against the job that triggered them so a permit-heavy project does not look more profitable than it was.
A fair question if you already have a bookkeeper, or a CPA who does the return each spring. 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 Aurora contractors do not need another system. They need the one they have configured for construction, so the job cost report answers a question instead of raising one.
Most QuickBooks files we inherit were built for a business that sells products. For a contractor that means jobs are customers, cost codes barely exist, retainage hides inside receivables, and a use tax deposit paid to the city gets expensed on the day it left the bank.
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 all in a second time. We connect the field system to the accounting so the month does not open with an argument about whose number is right.
One set of numbers the field and the office both believe.
Once the systems talk to each other, reporting stops being a history lesson. These are the reports Aurora contractors actually use to decide what to chase and what to walk away from:
See how this has gone for other contractors in our construction accounting case studies.
Aurora, Colorado. This is the Aurora in the Denver metro area, the third largest city in the state, spread across Arapahoe, Adams and a slice of Douglas counties, home to the Anschutz Medical Campus and Buckley Space Force Base. If you are looking for the Fox Valley city in Illinois, we have a separate page for Aurora, IL. The two markets have almost nothing in common financially, from the tax rules down to the kind of work on offer, so it is worth reading the right one.
Because most of what makes it expensive is not in your cost codes. Building inside a functioning hospital means an infection control risk assessment, temporary containment barriers, HEPA-filtered negative-air machines, sealed anterooms, cleaning protocols, escorted routes for debris, and often a night or weekend shift because the department cannot close. Those items are real, recurring and job specific, but a standard chart of accounts has nowhere to put them, so they land in general conditions or overhead. The bid looked fine. The margin came in low. Nobody can point to a single line explaining the gap.
An Infection Control Risk Assessment is the process a healthcare facility uses to decide how risky your construction work is to patients and what precautions you must take, expressed as a class of precautions with specific containment, air handling and cleaning requirements. Accreditation bodies expect it whenever construction, renovation or major maintenance could affect infection risk. Yes, it belongs in your accounting, because the class assigned to a scope is the single best predictor of what the work will really cost you. We set cost codes up so barrier construction, negative air equipment, monitoring and after-hours premium are captured by phase and by ICRA class, which also gives you real numbers to bid the next one.
Aurora is a home rule city, so it administers its own tax rather than leaving it to the state. Before the building permit is issued, the city collects a use tax deposit on construction materials at the city rate, currently 3.75 percent, or 4.00 percent in the Arapahoe County portion of the city where the county quarter point is added, calculated either on your estimate of materials and fixtures or, at a minimum, on 50 percent of the permit valuation the building division assesses. The deposit is only an estimate. Under section 130-61 of the city code a project report reconciling actual liability is due no later than 90 days after the final certificate of occupancy or final inspection, with any additional tax remitted then.
Probably not, and that is the point most contractors learn too late. Aurora requires refund claims for overpaid tax to be submitted no later than one year following the issuance of the final certificate of occupancy or final inspection. If you overestimated materials on a large permit, never filed the reconciliation, and the year has passed, the overpayment stops being recoverable. We carry the deposit as a receivable against the job from the day it is paid, put the reconciliation on the close calendar, and file it while the claim window is still open.
Colorado issues no statewide general contractor license, so licensing sits with the local jurisdiction and Aurora runs its own contractor licensing, registration and permit program. Electricians and plumbers are licensed at state level through the Department of Regulatory Agencies. Because Aurora reaches into Arapahoe, Adams and Douglas counties, and crews often also work Denver, Centennial and unincorporated county land, most contractors here carry several registrations at once. We record licensing, registration and permit fees against the job that triggered them instead of burying them in an annual overhead line.
Wage compliance changes. Federally funded and federally assisted construction above the statutory threshold falls under the Davis-Bacon Act, which means a wage determination per classification, weekly certified payroll, and fringe benefits accounted for properly rather than averaged. Colorado has its own layer as well: a public project awarded by a state agency of government at 500,000 dollars or more requires prevailing wages paid at weekly intervals under the law enacted by Senate Bill 19-196, and public works funded by state or local money carry the Keep Jobs in Colorado Act requirement that Colorado labor perform at least 80 percent of the work. We keep federal, state and private work separated in payroll so none of it contaminates the others.
On public work, C.R.S. 24-91-103 caps retainage at 5 percent of the contract price on covered public entity contracts, with the withheld amount due for release within 60 days after final acceptance. On private commercial work, House Bill 21-1167 capped retainage at 5 percent for private projects above 150,000 dollars, with an exemption for single family homes and multifamily buildings of no more than four units. The cap is not the problem. The problem is that retainage sits inside accounts receivable on most contractor books, so it ages like a slow-paying customer and nobody can say what is actually collectible.
C.R.S. 38-22-127 makes funds disbursed to a contractor or subcontractor trust funds for the benefit of the subcontractors, suppliers and laborers on that job, and it requires every contractor or subcontractor to maintain separate records of account for each project or contract. It does not require a separate bank account, which surprises people. That distinction matters: your job cost ledger is the compliance record. Violating the statute is treated as theft under C.R.S. 18-4-401 and can expose principals personally, so records that cannot show which money belonged to which job are a genuine risk rather than a paperwork gripe.
Start with the free Audit. Send us your current file and your last job cost or WIP report and we will tell you what is wrong, what it is costing, and whether your Aurora use tax deposits were ever reconciled. 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.
FinTruction provides construction accounting across Colorado. Select your city below for job costing, WIP and contractor bookkeeping support in your market.
If the tax position is settled and what keeps slipping is the close, our construction bookkeeping service covers cost-code coding, reconciliations, AP and AR, and payroll entry for Aurora contractors.
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Send us your current file and your last job cost report. We will tell you what is wrong with it, what it is costing you, and whether the money you left with the City of Aurora is still recoverable. No charge and no obligation for the Audit.
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