Construction Accounting in Schenectady, NY

Because you are not being bought as a construction contract, you are being bought as a vendor. Heavy industrial owners issue work through their purchasing system: a master agreement, then purchase orders or releases against a blanket order, then invoices through a supplier portal. There is no schedule of values, no G702 and often no retainage in the classic sense. What replaces all of it is a number on the face of the purchase order that you may not exceed. Contractors who arrive from the commercial world keep looking for the requisition cycle and miss the fact that the ceiling, not the schedule, is the thing that decides whether they get paid.

You work past the ceiling. Scope grows the way it always grows once equipment is opened up, the plant engineer tells your foreman to keep going, everyone acts in good faith, and nobody raises the purchase order. The hours are real, the material is bought, and when the invoice arrives it exceeds the authorized amount and sits in someone approval queue for a quarter. Verbal authority on a site does not create commercial authority in a procurement system. We track committed cost against the authorized ceiling on every open order and flag it while there is still time to get a revision issued rather than after the money is spent.

Separately from everything else, because it is a different business inside your business. An outage is a compressed window with heavy overtime, night and weekend shifts, mobilization and demobilization at both ends, and standby hours when a piece of equipment is not released on schedule. Roll all that into a general labor code and a profitable outage and an ugly one look identical. We cost the window by scope segment with premium time, mobilization, standby and remobilization visible on their own lines, because those four items are usually the entire difference between the two.

Unbilled revenue is work you have performed and not yet invoiced. On a progress-billed construction job it is a monthly nuisance. On purchase order work it is the main event, because you cannot invoice until the release is right, the receipt is posted in the customer system and the reference numbers match, and any one of those can hold a legitimate invoice for weeks. A company with a strong margin and a large unbilled balance is a company running out of cash. We report unbilled by customer and by order every month, with the reason each item is stuck, so it is a work list rather than a mystery.

It can make the terms visible and the invoices unrejectable, which is most of the battle. Large industrial buyers set payment terms in the master agreement and the clock generally starts from a clean invoice matched to a valid order and a posted receipt, not from the day you sent it. Most of what contractors experience as slow payment is really rework: a wrong order number, an unposted receipt, a missing signed ticket. We build the invoice package to match what the portal wants the first time, log submission dates so the delay is measurable, and forecast cash on the terms you actually agreed to rather than the ones you hoped for.

It may be neither, in sales tax terms. New York provides an exemption for machinery and equipment used directly and predominantly in production, which is a different mechanism from the capital improvement rules that govern work on the building itself. On a plant job you can be improving real property, installing exempt production equipment and performing taxable repair work inside the same order, and which is which decides the tax on both the labor and the material. The certificate the customer has to give you depends on which treatment applies, and it has to be obtained around the time of the work. Confirm the current forms and rules for your specific scope, and get the paperwork while the job is live rather than during an assessment.

Yes, and it is a genuinely different business in the same city. Schenectady has a downtown that has been under sustained redevelopment for years, a waterfront built on the former American Locomotive works, and the Stockade, which is New York first designated historic district and full of eighteenth and nineteenth century houses. Work on that stock is small, tightly scheduled, restricted in what you may touch, and priced by the surprise. Most of the contractors we speak to here run plant work and building work side by side. If your job costing cannot separate them you are averaging two different businesses and calling the result a margin.

Possibly, and it turns on how the project is funded rather than on who owns the site. New York applies prevailing wage to public work under Labor Law Article 8, and separately extends it to certain privately contracted projects that carry enough public funding. That test is where an incentive-assisted private development can quietly become covered work. Our Albany construction accounting page covers the public work machinery and the registration and certified payroll obligations that come with it. The Schenectady version of the question is usually about a redevelopment deal, so read the funding structure before you price the labor.

We work with contractors across Schenectady, Albany, Saratoga and Rensselaer counties, including Schenectady, Niskayuna, Rotterdam, Glenville, Scotia, Amsterdam, Ballston Spa and Clifton Park. 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, your open purchase orders and your last job profitability or WIP report, and we will tell you what is wrong, what it is costing you, and how much you have already spent above an authorized ceiling. 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.