Construction Accounting in Fort Myers, FL

In a special flood hazard area, if the cost to repair a building back to its pre-damage condition reaches 50 percent or more of the market value of the structure before the damage, the building is considered substantially damaged. At that point it has to be brought into compliance with current floodplain standards, which in practice usually means elevating the lowest floor above base flood elevation plus any required freeboard. The rule looks at the structure only, not the land. So a repair estimate is not just a price in Lee County, it is the thing that decides whether the job is a repair at all or a full code-compliance rebuild.

No, and this is one of the most commonly misapplied parts of the rule. The threshold is measured on the cost of repairing the damage, not on the cost of the compliance work the determination then triggers. Including the elevation cost in the repair estimate inflates the number that decides substantial damage in the first place, which is circular. Getting this wrong in either direction is expensive, so the estimate needs to be built from cost records that clearly separate repair scope from compliance scope. That is an accounting problem as much as an estimating one.

Not as ordinary revenue, and not netted against cost. On insurance-funded work the money arrives from a carrier on the adjuster schedule rather than from your customer on yours, it often arrives in stages tied to a scope that is still being argued about, and supplements can be approved months after the work is done. We keep the contract, the approved scope, the supplements pending and the proceeds received as separate visible numbers on the job. Otherwise you genuinely cannot tell whether the job made money or whether you are simply holding somebody else money.

Under the Florida construction lien law, a lienor who does not have a direct contract with the owner generally has to serve a Notice to Owner within 45 days of first furnishing labor or materials in order to preserve lien rights. Miss it and the lien right is usually gone, regardless of how good the debt is. We are not attorneys and we do not serve notices. What we do is record first-furnishing dates by job as a matter of routine so the 45 day clock is visible in the records rather than reconstructed from a truck log after the money goes unpaid.

A meaningful share of it, yes. Ian made landfall in Lee County in September 2022 and the recovery is not finished. Significant stretches of the barrier islands are still in various stages of reconstruction, some properties remain tangled in litigation that delays rebuilding, and major public projects like the Fort Myers Beach pier have only recently reached construction. What has changed is the economics. Construction costs, insurance costs, resiliency requirements, flood mitigation and elevated parking have all reset what a viable project looks like, so the jobs being built now are not the jobs that were there before.

For most real property improvement work in Florida the contractor is treated as the consumer of the materials, meaning you pay tax on the purchase rather than charging your customer sales tax on the contract. The treatment can differ depending on how the contract is written and on the nature of what is being installed, so lump sum and certain other contract forms do not all behave identically. The practical accounting point is that material tax is part of your cost and belongs on the job. Buried in an overhead account it quietly understates every bid you produce from historical cost.

Yes, and they are their own discipline. Coastal condominium work in Lee County runs through an association rather than a single owner, which means board approvals, reserve funding, special assessments and often an insurance claim all sitting between the scope and the money. Draw schedules answer to the association and its lender rather than to your billing cycle, and documentation is requested at a level of detail most contractors are not keeping. We structure job costing so a draw package is produced from the records rather than assembled from scratch each month.

Separately from ordinary receivables, always. Florida sets limits on retainage for public construction contracts and provides for its reduction as work progresses, while private contracts follow their own terms and vary widely. Either way, retainage sitting inside accounts receivable is money nobody is chasing, and it overstates how liquid your balance sheet looks to a lender. We track retainage receivable and payable by contract, with the release condition and an aging attached, so you know what is owed and whether the condition has already been met.

We work with contractors across Lee, Collier and Charlotte counties, including Fort Myers, Cape Coral, Fort Myers Beach, Sanibel, Captiva, Bonita Springs, Estero, Naples, Punta Gorda and Port Charlotte. Our work is fully remote, so you get construction-specific accounting without paying toward an office you would never visit.

Start with the free Audit. Send your current file and your last job profitability or WIP report and we will tell you what is wrong, what it is costing you, and whether your insurance-funded jobs are actually earning what you think. 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.