Built for jobs that run two or three years before anyone hands over a key
A downtown Bellevue tower crosses several fiscal years before it tops out. Cost to date says the job is half complete, the estimate to complete has not been rebuilt since the concrete package was bought out, and retention sits across forty subcontracts nobody has aged. Construction accounting in Bellevue has to hold a job together for that long: a WIP schedule rebuilt monthly instead of rolled forward, retention tracked per subcontract with its release condition, labor burden re-derived as the trade mix changes floor by floor, and revenue split by B&O classification before the excise return is due.
On the ground
Downtown Bellevue, Washington
Bellevue stopped being a suburb of Seattle some time ago. Downtown Bellevue now carries a genuine skyline of office and residential towers, Amazon has built out a large Eastside office presence, Microsoft sits next door in Redmond, and the Spring District has pulled corporate tenants into what used to be light industrial land. Light rail reaches the Eastside, and the corridors around it in BelRed and Wilburton have been rezoned for the density that usually follows a station. The result is a construction market whose defining product is the tower and the podium block, not the tilt-up shed.
That product has an accounting shape of its own. A high-rise takes years, not months. The schedule is set by the concrete pour cycle, and the crane and hoist that serve it are rented by the month, so time itself is a direct cost. The subcontractor list runs into the dozens across several tiers, each holding and owing retention on different terms. Owners and construction lenders release money through a draw process with an inspector and a documentation standard that has nothing to do with how you would normally invoice. None of that is exotic work, but all of it punishes a contractor whose office is running on a bank feed and a spreadsheet. Most Eastside commercial work is administered in Procore, so we connect Procore to QuickBooks and stop the office retyping commitments and change orders the field already entered.
Around the towers sit two other markets. Tenant improvement churn in Class A space is fast, competitive and high volume, which puts pressure on a completely different part of the accounting: many small contracts, quick closeouts and a need to know job margin within days rather than quarters. And on the water in Medina, Clyde Hill, Hunts Point, Yarrow Point and Mercer Island there is custom residential at some of the highest price points in the country, usually built cost-plus under a guaranteed maximum price, where the client keeps audit rights over your ledger and the build itself can run for years.
Layered over all of it is Washington, which charges business and occupation tax on gross receipts rather than profit, applies retail sales tax to the entire price of a custom construction contract including labor, prices industrial insurance by the hour worked in each risk class, and lets the City of Bellevue run a second B&O tax of its own. A contractor who is excellent at building towers and average at paperwork does not fail here because of the building. It fails because a two-year contract with an estimate nobody refreshed turns into a margin problem that surfaces at month twenty. Our guide to work in progress reporting covers the mechanics, and you can see how the same discipline played out for other builders in our construction accounting case studies.
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.
On a two or three year job the work in progress schedule is the only report that tells you the truth early enough to act on. Cost to date is history. The estimate to complete is the forecast, and it is the number that decides whether the contract still earns the margin it was bid at. We rebuild it monthly with the project manager, code by code, rather than carrying last month's figure forward.
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 →
High-rise cost structures do not look like flat work. The concrete pour cycle drives the schedule, and the crane, the hoist and the site facilities bill by the month regardless of how that cycle goes, which means a lost week is a cost and not just a delay. Job costing in Bellevue has to make that visible while the building is still going up.
A Bellevue tower carries dozens of subcontracts, each with its own retention percentage, its own release trigger and its own completion date. Meanwhile the construction lender wants a draw package with backup that your invoice format was never designed to produce. Both problems are solved in the same place, by organizing the job cost so the paperwork is a report rather than an assembly job.
Washington taxes gross receipts and taxes them differently depending on how the contract was written, and federal law treats anything running past a year as a long-term contract with its own rules. Neither is a year-end problem. Our construction tax planning starts by reading your contracts, then makes the accounting produce both filings without a reconstruction.
Taking a tower is a balance sheet decision before it is an operations decision. The mobilisation is funded months before the first draw clears, retention builds for two years, and your single-job limit has to move before you can sign. Our controller services and CFO services answer what the company can actually carry.
The Eastside builds long. Tower and podium projects, transit work and multi-year custom residential all run past the point where a general ledger tells you anything useful on its own, and Washington adds a tax regime that turns on how each contract is written.
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 the Eastside, from concrete and crane crews on downtown Bellevue towers to the custom builders and specialty trades working the waterfront in Medina, Clyde Hill and Mercer Island.
Running a Construction Company in Bellevue?
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The Washington Business and Occupation tax is charged by the Department of Revenue on gross receipts with no deduction for labor, materials or subcontractors, and construction sits in several different classifications. Building for a customer who owns the land is custom construction. A developer building on its own land in order to sell is a speculative builder. Public road construction for a state or local body follows a third set of rules, and federal government contracting a fourth. On a single Bellevue tower the developer and the general contractor can be in different classifications at the same time, so the decision belongs on each contract file rather than on the company as a whole.
Bellevue levies its own municipal business and occupation tax on top of the state tax, administered by the city with separate registration and quarterly returns filed through the FileLocal portal. Contractors generally report in the retailing classification, because constructing, repairing and improving real property for a consumer is treated as a retail service. Bellevue also runs a square footage B&O tax on business floor area occupied within city limits, which catches contractors with an office or a yard here even when most of the work is elsewhere. Businesses below the annual taxable receipts threshold are exempt from paying the gross receipts tax but still have to file.
On custom construction a Washington contractor is making a retail sale, so sales tax applies to the entire contract price including labor rather than to materials alone. Washington then sources the sale to where the work is performed, which means the combined rate follows the job site and the Department of Revenue location code assigned to it, not the address of your office. A contractor running jobs in Bellevue, Redmond, Kirkland and unincorporated King County in the same quarter is dealing with several rates at once, and applying one default rate across all of them under-collects on some jobs and over-collects on others simultaneously.
Washington is a monopolistic workers compensation state, so unless you are certified as self-insured your industrial insurance comes from the Labor and Industries state fund and the premium is assessed per hour worked in each risk classification, with a portion deducted from the worker. On a multi-year tower this is not a static number. The shoring, excavation and structural crews of the first year carry different classifications from the glaziers, mechanical fitters and interior trades who finish it, so a burden percentage locked in at bid drifts further from reality every quarter. Burden has to be re-derived by phase or the remaining labor in your estimate to complete is priced wrong.
Light rail work, City of Bellevue capital projects, school district and Bellevue College construction are public works, so contractors and subcontractors must pay the prevailing wage rates published by Labor and Industries for the trade and for King County. That obligation arrives as three documents: a Statement of Intent to Pay Prevailing Wages approved before payment, certified payroll records covering the work, and an Affidavit of Wages Paid approved before final payment and release of retainage. Each carries a filing fee and each subcontractor files their own. All three come out of payroll, which is why we treat prevailing wage as an accounting function and not as office paperwork.
Public bodies in Washington may retain up to five percent of the contract, and a contractor can generally elect how it is held, including posting a bond in lieu of retainage. The part that surprises people is the release, because the awarding agency has to obtain clearances from the Department of Revenue, the Employment Security Department and Labor and Industries before the money moves. Your own filing status therefore controls your own cash. On a private Bellevue tower the retention terms are whatever the contract says, frequently reducing at a milestone, which is precisely why it has to be tracked per subcontract rather than as one company-wide percentage.
A construction contract that is not completed in the tax year it is entered into is a long-term contract for federal purposes, and Section 460 generally requires the percentage-of-completion method rather than deferral to completion. The small construction contract exception requires both that the contract is expected to finish within two years of commencement and that average annual gross receipts fall under the inflation-adjusted threshold in Section 448(c), and a tower fails the first test immediately. When the contract closes, the look-back method recomputes each prior year on actual results and charges or refunds interest on the difference, reported on Form 8697. Estimating badly on long jobs therefore has a direct cash cost at the end of them.
A fair question if you already have a bookkeeper, a payroll service and a CPA who prepares the return. Here is the honest answer.
Most Eastside contractors do not need new software. They need what they already pay for configured so a job that runs for three years still reports honestly in month twenty-six, with the Washington and Bellevue tax structure built into the file rather than patched on at filing time.
The QuickBooks files we inherit were almost always configured for a business that sells products off a shelf. For a high-rise contractor that means no cost codes below the job, retention sitting inside receivables, one sales tax rate applied everywhere, and no way to separate custom construction revenue from speculative building revenue when the excise return falls due.
Is your QuickBooks file working against you?
On a job with dozens of subcontracts the commitment log in the project management platform and the payable ledger in accounting have to be the same set of numbers. When they are not, the monthly WIP becomes an argument instead of a report. We connect the two so the data arrives once and arrives coded.
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 Eastside contractors use to decide what to chase, what to price differently and what to walk away from:
Every report above is produced from the same books your Washington construction accounting filings are read off.
Because duration changes the shape of every number. A downtown Bellevue tower runs two to three years, so the contract crosses multiple fiscal years, the crew composition turns over completely between excavation and interior finish, and retention accumulates across dozens of subcontracts long before any of it is released. On a six-month job an inaccurate estimate to complete corrects itself before it matters. On a tower it compounds for twenty-four months and then arrives as margin fade nobody forecast. Long-duration work makes the work in progress schedule, the estimate to complete and the retention register load-bearing rather than optional.
Federal law treats it as a long-term contract under IRC Section 460, which generally requires the percentage-of-completion method for tax rather than letting you defer the whole result to completion. The small construction contract exception only helps if the contract is expected to be completed within two years of commencement and your average annual gross receipts sit under the inflation-adjusted threshold in Section 448(c), and a Bellevue tower fails the two-year test on day one. Completed contracts then face the look-back method, reported on Form 8697, which recomputes each year using actual results and charges or refunds interest on the difference. Accurate estimates are therefore a cash item, not a reporting nicety.
Yes. The City of Bellevue administers a municipal business and occupation tax that is separate from the state tax collected by the Department of Revenue, with its own registration and quarterly filing through the FileLocal portal. Contractors generally fall into the retailing classification at city level, because constructing and improving real property for a consumer is a retail service. Bellevue also levies a square footage B&O tax on business floor area occupied inside the city, and businesses under the annual taxable receipts threshold are exempt from paying gross receipts tax but still have to file the return. An office or yard inside city limits is therefore a filing obligation on its own.
It decides the whole tax treatment. When you build for a customer who owns the property, Washington treats you as making a retail sale of custom construction, so retail sales tax applies to the full contract price including your labor, and you buy your materials without paying tax on them. A developer building on land it owns in order to sell is a speculative builder instead, is the consumer of everything that goes into the building, and pays tax on materials and subcontracts rather than collecting it on a sale. Both parties can be on the same Bellevue tower with opposite obligations, so the classification belongs on the contract file before the first pay application.
Separately from accounts receivable and accounts payable, at the level of each individual contract, with the condition that releases it recorded alongside the balance. On a tower you are holding retention from thirty or forty subcontractors while an owner holds it from you, the release triggers differ from subcontract to subcontract, and some trades finish eighteen months before the building does. Retention buried inside ordinary receivables is retention nobody is chasing, and it also misstates working capital to a surety reading the balance sheet. We keep a retention register showing held, owed, release condition and age by contract.
They are job costs, and on high-rise work they are among the largest ones, which is why leaving them in overhead distorts every project you compare afterwards. Crane erection, monthly crane rental, jumping the crane as the building rises, the personnel and material hoist, pumping, and the supervision and site facilities that run for the whole duration are all time-driven rather than quantity-driven. That has a consequence most cost reports miss: a schedule slip converts directly into cost, because the crane and the hoist keep billing whether the concrete cycle held or not. We code tower logistics to their own cost codes so the price of lost time is visible while there is still schedule left to protect.
By rebuilding burden from hours rather than fixing a percentage at bid. Washington assesses industrial insurance premiums per hour worked in each Labor and Industries risk classification, so the burden on a shoring and excavation crew is not the burden on a drywall crew working an enclosed floor twenty months later. A single blended rate set when the job was bid is roughly right in the middle of the project and wrong at both ends, which is exactly when the estimate to complete matters most. On multi-year work we re-derive the burden by phase, so the labor left in the forecast is priced at the classes that will actually perform it.
Yes. Public works in Washington fall under RCW 39.12, so light rail work, City of Bellevue capital projects, Bellevue School District and Bellevue College construction all require prevailing wage rates set by Labor and Industries for the trade and for King County. Practically that means a Statement of Intent to Pay Prevailing Wages approved before you are paid, certified payroll records covering the work, and an Affidavit of Wages Paid approved before final payment and retainage release. Each of your subcontractors files their own. All of it is produced from payroll data, which is why the certified payroll and the labor in your job cost report have to come out of the same process.
Yes, and the Points communities and Mercer Island bring a specific version of the problem. High-end custom work is usually cost-plus with a guaranteed maximum price, and the client, their attorney or a family office holds audit rights over your cost ledger, so the books stop being an internal record and become a document somebody else reads line by line. Every invoice needs to be traceable to the job, the fee basis has to be applied consistently, and the split between reimbursable cost, general conditions and fee has to survive questioning. We keep the cost ledger in a state where an owner audit is a report you run rather than a fortnight of reconstruction.
We work with contractors across the Eastside and the wider Puget Sound region, including Bellevue, Redmond, Kirkland, Issaquah, Sammamish, Mercer Island, Renton, Bothell, Woodinville, Medina, Clyde Hill and Newcastle. Our work is fully remote, so you are not paying toward an office nobody visits. Start with the free Audit: send your accounting file and your most recent WIP or job profitability report and we will tell you what is wrong, what it is costing you and what it would take to fix. After that it is a flat monthly fee based on transaction volume, active jobs and reporting needs. Sahil Ahmad, CPA reviews the work.
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