Every task order its own job, and a payroll week that closes on time
One contract number, forty jobs. That is what the books look like once a Colorado Springs contractor gets on a Front Range multiple award vehicle and the task orders start landing at Fort Carson, Peterson and Schriever. In QuickBooks it shows up as a single government customer, so nobody can say which task order made money. Meanwhile the payroll week never stops: federal work above two thousand dollars owes a certified payroll every week it runs. We set up the file so every task order is its own job, the costs land where they belong, and the weekly records are already sitting there when the contracting officer asks.
On the ground
Pikes Peak and the Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs
Installation work does not arrive as one big contract. It arrives as a stream of task orders, each with its own scope, its own period of performance and often its own wage determination, and the bookkeeping has to be able to tell them apart from the day the first hour is charged.
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.
Colorado Springs is unusual among mid-size construction markets because so much of the work reaches contractors through a single procurement door. The Front Range Multiple Award Construction Contract is an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity vehicle used to buy design-build, sustainment, repair, alteration, renovation and minor construction across Peterson Space Force Base, Schriever Space Force Base, Cheyenne Mountain Space Force Station, the United States Air Force Academy, Fort Carson including the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site, and other Front Range installations. Winning a seat on it does not give you one job. It gives you a queue.
That is a bookkeeping shape most files are not built for. Task orders come in at wildly different sizes, from small orders under the simplified acquisition threshold to multi-million dollar builds, and they overlap. Three or four can be running at once on three different installations with different access requirements, different wage determinations and different completion dates. If the office opens one customer record for the base and books everything to it, the file has quietly stopped being able to answer the only question that matters, which is whether a given order was worth taking.
The second thing that breaks is cadence. Most construction bookkeeping is built around a monthly close, and a monthly close is fine for a private remodel. It is not fine when Davis-Bacon requires a certified payroll for every single week that contract work is performed, with a signed statement of compliance. A month-end habit means five weeks of certified payroll assembled at once from memory and paper timesheets, which is how classifications drift, fringe amounts get rounded and a payment gets held.
Then there is the ordinary local friction on top: gate and escort time that nobody codes anywhere, material receipts from a run to a supplier on Powers that could belong to any of three jobs, and permit paperwork from Pikes Peak Regional Building Department that gets filed with the drawings instead of against the job cost. None of that is exotic. It is just the daily volume of a Pikes Peak contractor, and it compounds fast when the file cannot tell one task order from another.
The single highest-value thing we do for a Colorado Springs federal contractor happens before any transaction is recorded: opening the job correctly. Every task order gets its own job record, its own cost codes, its own wage determination reference and its own period of performance. After that, coding is a routine decision rather than a judgment call.
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 →
On federal work the payroll week is the unit of account. We keep the underlying records current every week so the certified payroll comes out of live data: hours by classification and job, fringe amounts, apprentice ratios and deductions all sitting where they belong before anyone needs to sign a statement of compliance.
Most files we inherit here have the same three faults: one customer record standing in for a whole installation, labor pooled in a single payroll expense account, and retainage hidden inside accounts receivable. We rebuild the file for construction and, where the source documents allow it, split the historic work back out by task order so last year finally becomes readable.
Colorado treats the money you receive on a job as trust funds for the people who earned it, and the statute asks for separate records of account per project. That is an accounts payable discipline as much as a legal one. We keep receipts and disbursements traceable job by job so you can show where a task order payment went.
Several small task orders each holding a little retainage adds up to a number nobody in the office can state out loud. We record every progress payment and pay application against the order it belongs to, keep retainage receivable in its own account by task order, and run an aging so held money stops being invisible.
The weekly rhythm keeps the payroll side honest. The monthly close is what you run the company on. Every month you get a reconciled, construction-formatted statement package on the same date, with profitability broken out by task order rather than lumped into one federal line.
We keep books for contractors across El Paso, Teller and Pueblo counties, from small trades running two task orders at a time to general contractors moving between installation work and private jobs in the same week.
Running a Construction Company in Colorado Springs?
Get Your Free AuditA 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 |
Under C.R.S. 38-22-127, funds disbursed to a contractor or subcontractor on a building, construction or remodeling contract are held in trust for the subcontractors, laborers and suppliers who earned them, and subsection 4 requires every contractor and subcontractor to maintain separate records of account for each project or contract. The same subsection expressly says separate bank accounts are not required. In other words the state puts the burden on your books rather than your banking, and violating the trust provisions is treated as theft under section 18-4-401. Our coding keeps receipts and disbursements traceable per job so that record exists as a matter of routine.
The Davis-Bacon Act reaches federal construction contracts above two thousand dollars, and 29 CFR 5.5 requires a certified payroll for every week in which contract work is performed, accompanied by a signed statement of compliance. Form WH-347 is the optional form most contractors use. The record keeping is the hard part, not the form: hours by classification, fringe amounts, deductions and apprentice ratios have to be right in the underlying payroll before anyone can certify anything. We keep those records on a weekly cycle rather than reconstructing them at month end.
Colorado has its own prevailing wage requirement under the Keep Jobs in Colorado Act at C.R.S. 8-17-101 and following, administered by the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. It reaches contracts of 500,000 dollars or more with an agency of state government and requires wages to be paid weekly, and the same article requires that Colorado labor perform at least eighty percent of the work on public works financed by state, county, school district or municipal funds. It is not the same thing as Davis-Bacon and a job can sit under one, both or neither, so we tag which regime applies at job setup.
The Colorado Overtime and Minimum Pay Standards Order requires time and a half for hours over 40 in a workweek, over 12 in a workday, or over 12 consecutive hours, whichever produces the most pay, and coverage extends to nearly all private employers. Long single days are ordinary on installation work once gate access and escort time are added to a full shift, so the daily trigger fires more often in Colorado Springs than a default payroll setup expects. We test the coding against all three thresholds and land the premium on the job that caused it.
Pikes Peak Regional Building Department collects a use tax when a building permit is issued, with the applicant choosing between a project material valuation method, which estimates the material share of the permitted project cost, and a project affidavit method. What goes wrong in the books is filing, not arithmetic. The receipt ends up with the drawings, so months later nobody can say what was prepaid, for which jurisdiction, on which job. We record it as a job cost with the permit number attached and keep the material invoices coded against the same job.
A contractor who pays a subcontractor at or above the IRS reporting threshold in a year has to issue a 1099-NEC. On task order work the sub list changes constantly and a vendor who was paid twice on one small order is easy to miss. We collect the W-9 before the first payment and track subcontractor payments by vendor and job all year, so January is a report rather than an investigation.
A fair question if you already have a bookkeeper who has been with you for years. 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 Colorado Springs contractors do not need a new platform. They need the one they already pay for set up so a task order is a job, labor lands on it, and the weekly payroll data is usable without rekeying.
A QuickBooks file configured by someone who has never seen a federal task order will show one government customer and a single payroll expense line. We restructure it so the job list mirrors your order list and the reports answer questions instead of raising them.
Is your QuickBooks file hiding your best jobs?
If your project managers already hold budgets, commitments and modifications in a construction platform, the office should not be typing them again. We connect the field system to the books so the numbers agree and the week does not open with an argument about whose figure is right.
One set of numbers the field and the office both believe.
Once the file is structured properly, the reporting stops being a history lesson. These are the ones Pikes Peak contractors actually use to decide what to bid next.
See how we have done this for other contractors in our construction accounting case studies.
One job per task order, never one job per contract vehicle. The Front Range Multiple Award Construction Contract is an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity vehicle covering Peterson Space Force Base, Schriever Space Force Base, Cheyenne Mountain Space Force Station, the Air Force Academy, Fort Carson and other Front Range installations, and the work reaches you as individual task orders. Each task order has its own scope, its own period of performance and often its own wage determination. Set up as one customer called Fort Carson, the file can tell you the federal work as a whole made money and nothing else. Set up per task order, you can see which ones actually did.
Weekly, not monthly. Federal construction contracts above two thousand dollars fall under the Davis-Bacon Act, and 29 CFR 5.5 requires a certified payroll for every week in which contract work is performed, with a signed statement of compliance attached. That means the payroll week is the real unit of account here, not the calendar month. We run payroll coding, job allocation and the supporting records on a weekly rhythm so the certified payroll is produced from live data rather than rebuilt from timesheets on a Thursday afternoon.
Yes. C.R.S. 38-22-127 treats funds disbursed to a contractor or subcontractor on a construction project as trust funds for the subcontractors, laborers and suppliers who earned them, and subsection 4 requires every contractor and subcontractor to maintain separate records of account for each project or contract. The same subsection says you do not have to open a separate bank account per job. So the obligation lands squarely on the bookkeeping, not on the banking. One undifferentiated ledger is not just poor management information in Colorado, it is short of what the statute asks for.
Because Colorado does not stop at 40 hours. The Colorado Overtime and Minimum Pay Standards Order requires time and a half for hours over 40 in a workweek, over 12 in a workday, or over 12 consecutive hours, whichever produces the most pay. Long single days are normal on installation work with a badge line at the gate, so the daily trigger fires far more often here than most out-of-state payroll settings expect. We check the coding against all three tests and make sure the resulting premium lands on the job that caused it instead of in a company-wide payroll account.
They are two separate regimes and a job can sit under either, both or neither. Davis-Bacon applies to federal contracts above two thousand dollars with weekly certified payroll and a statement of compliance. Colorado has its own requirement under the Keep Jobs in Colorado Act at C.R.S. 8-17-101 and following, administered by the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, which reaches contracts of 500,000 dollars or more with an agency of state government and requires wages to be paid weekly. Local school district or county work is a different question again. We tag each job with which regime applies at setup so nobody has to guess later.
That is one of the most common ways Colorado Springs contractors start with us. The usual pattern is one government customer, no task order structure, labor sitting in a single payroll expense account, material receipts uncoded and retainage buried inside receivables. We rebuild the chart of accounts for construction, split the historic federal work back out by task order where the source documents allow it, correct the retainage entries and reconcile forward until the file is current. Then a fixed monthly close keeps it there.
Pikes Peak Regional Building Department collects a use tax at the time a building permit is issued, with the applicant choosing between a project material valuation method and a project affidavit method. The bookkeeping problem is that the receipt often gets filed with the permit rather than against the job, so nobody can tell later what was prepaid, at what rate, for which jurisdiction. We record it as a job cost with the permit number attached, and we keep the material invoices coded so you can see whether the prepaid estimate matched what you actually bought.
Yes, and on federal task orders it matters more than most contractors expect, because money can sit held for months across several small orders at once and the total is easy to lose sight of. We record retainage receivable by task order rather than by contract vehicle, enter each progress payment and pay application against the job it belongs to, and keep an aging so you can see what is held, by whom, and how long it has been sitting.
We keep books for contractors across El Paso, Teller and Pueblo counties, including Colorado Springs, Fountain, Security-Widefield, Manitou Springs, Monument, Falcon, Peyton, Woodland Park, Canon City and Pueblo. All of it is remote, so you get construction bookkeeping without paying toward an office you would never visit.
Start with the free Audit. Send your current QuickBooks file and your last month of payroll and we will tell you what is coded wrong, what it is hiding, and whether your per-project records would satisfy the Colorado trust fund statute. No obligation. After that it is a flat monthly fee based on transaction volume, active jobs and payroll complexity, so asking a question does not start a clock. Sahil Ahmad, CPA reviews the work.
FinTruction keeps construction books across Colorado. Select your city below for contractor bookkeeping, job-cost coding and monthly close support in your market.
Once the day-to-day records are clean, we also handle WIP schedules, revenue recognition, tax planning and CFO support for Colorado Springs contractors bidding larger federal and commercial work.
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Send us your QuickBooks file and your last month of payroll. We will tell you what is coded wrong, which task orders you cannot currently see, and whether your per-project records would hold up under the Colorado trust fund statute. No charge and no obligation for the Audit.
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