Payroll that lands on the right job, clean coding, and a close you can plan around
One timesheet decides four things in a Fort Wayne shop, and most of them get filled in on a truck dashboard. It sets which job and cost code the labor lands on, whether the hour belongs to the contract side or the service side, what a weekly certified payroll says on a federal job, and which Indiana county income tax comes out, because that rate follows where the man lived on 1 January rather than where the work is. Six men on one crew can easily sit in five counties. We take over the payroll entry, the coding and the monthly close so the timesheet stops being a guess.
On the ground
Parkview Field, downtown Fort Wayne, Allen County. Photos: Diego Delso (CC BY-SA 3.0) and Katjusa Cisar (CC BY 2.0)
This is the piece that decides whether the rest of your file is worth reading. We process the weekly run, put the hours where they belong, apply the correct Indiana county rate for each employee, and build a burden rate out of your actual costs instead of a percentage somebody picked years ago.
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 →
Plenty of Fort Wayne companies run long contract work and a high-volume service department out of one file. Averaged together they tell you nothing: the service work looks like it carries the company, or the contract work does, and neither impression survives contact with the detail.
The payables desk is where compliance documents are either collected or lost forever, because after a subcontractor has been paid in full your leverage is gone. We run the vendor file as a control rather than an address book.
Contract work bills on a schedule of values with money held back. Service work bills on completion and should clear in weeks. Run through one undifferentiated receivables ledger, the slow money hides the fast money and nobody chases either properly.
Most contractors reach us mid-backlog rather than shopping around. Catch-up is scoped work with a finish date. After that the close is the product: a reconciled file and a construction-formatted package on a date you can plan around. Contractors who then need WIP and bonding-ready statements move up to construction accounting in Fort Wayne.
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.
Labor is the largest number in a northeast Indiana contractor file, it is processed weekly rather than monthly, and it is the one entry that has to be right for four different purposes at once. Everything downstream, job costing included, is only as good as the timesheet it came from.
The bookkeeping problem in northeast Indiana is rarely sophistication. It is cadence. A contractor here can be running serious volume with an owner, an estimator, a couple of foremen and one office person who also answers the phone, orders material and chases the supply house about a backorder. That office runs payroll every week, not every month, and a service department can generate more invoices in a fortnight than a small contract job generates in a year. The complexity is ordinary. The frequency is what breaks people.
Geography adds a wrinkle that contractors in single-county metros never deal with. Allen County is ringed by DeKalb, Noble, Whitley, Huntington, Wells and Adams counties, and the Ohio state line sits roughly twenty miles east, so a crew working one Fort Wayne job routinely drives in from four or five different counties. Indiana attaches county income tax to where the employee lived on 1 January, not to where the job is, so the withholding is a fact about each person on the truck. Every spring hire resets it, and nobody chases a Form WH-4 in June.
What that costs is not the payroll error itself. It is what the payroll error does to everything built on top of it. Hours that land in a general labor account make job profitability a work of fiction. A burden rate carried forward from a year when insurance was cheaper prices the next twelve months of bids too low. By autumn nobody in the company quite believes the numbers, so decisions get made on instinct while a perfectly good accounting system sits there holding the wrong data.
The fix is unglamorous and smaller than most owners expect. Get current, put the payroll on a routine that does not depend on anyone having a spare evening, code costs as they arrive, and close the month on the same date every time. Our construction bookkeeping case studies show what that looks like on the other side of the cleanup.
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 handle the day-to-day books for contractors across Allen County and northeast Indiana, from mechanical and industrial crews with a service department attached to the builders working the suburbs and the older housing stock.
Behind on the Books in Fort Wayne?
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County Income Tax Follows the Employee, Not the Job: Indiana counties levy a local income tax that the employer withholds alongside state tax. The rate is determined by the employee's Indiana county of residence as of 1 January; where the employee did not live in an Indiana county on that date but their principal place of work or business was in one, that county's rate applies instead. Both facts are collected on Form WH-4, which you retain rather than file, and they hold for the year. Rates are set county by county and differ across northeast Indiana, so a single crew can carry several. This is a per-employee setup task that has to happen at hire.
Prevailing Wage: Repealed by the State, Live on Federal Money: Indiana repealed the Common Construction Wage Act effective 1 July 2015, so state and locally funded public works carry no state prevailing wage rate and no state certified payroll requirement. Federally funded and federally assisted contracts above 2,000 dollars remain subject to the Davis-Bacon Act, with the applicable wage determination, weekly certified payroll and fringe benefit accounting, generally on US Department of Labor Form WH-347. The repeal removed a state obligation and nothing else. Because the state routine disappeared, the first federal job is often the first certified payroll a Fort Wayne contractor has ever produced.
Sales and Use Tax Is Decided at Data Entry: Whether a job is lump sum or time and materials changes whether you charge your customer sales tax or owe use tax on the materials you install, and that is a coding decision made when the job opens and repeated on every purchase and invoice afterwards. Materials bought without Indiana tax need flagging as they are consumed so the accrual exists before the return falls due. We record contract type on the job and configure vendor and item defaults so the two streams separate themselves. The position itself is argued on our Fort Wayne construction accounting page.
Independent Contractors and Worker Compensation Clearance: Indiana treats a person as an independent contractor for worker compensation purposes where they qualify as one under Internal Revenue Service guidelines, and the Worker Compensation Board runs a clearance certificate process for independent contractors who are not required to carry coverage on themselves. What a subcontractor tells you on the phone is not evidence. The control is documentary: the certificate or a certificate of insurance on file, dated, with an expiry that somebody watches, collected alongside the W-9 before the first payment goes out rather than after an injury.
1099-NEC and Worker Classification: A contractor paying a subcontractor 600 dollars or more in a year has to file a 1099-NEC, and in a market with plenty of one-truck operators the line between a subcontractor and an employee gets tested by insurers and auditors rather than by you. Both problems are solved by the same discipline: collect the W-9 first, code every payment to the vendor and the job as it happens, and keep the certificate file current. Handled that way, January is a print run rather than a hunt for addresses.
The Indiana Filing Calendar Only Works on Current Books: Indiana withholding is remitted with Form WH-1 on the cycle the Department of Revenue assigns you and reconciled annually on Form WH-3, both submitted through INTIME. Quarterly wage and unemployment reporting goes to the Department of Workforce Development, and federal Form 941 sits alongside them. Every one of those is straightforward when the books are current and expensive when they are not, because a return filed on an estimate has to be amended later, usually at the least convenient moment.
Lien Deadlines Run Off Dates Your Books Hold: Indiana lien rights depend on recording a notice of intention to hold a lien with the county recorder within a window measured from the last day labor or materials were furnished, and that window is shorter on owner-occupied residential work. We are not attorneys and we do not file notices. What bookkeeping contributes is the raw material: unpaid balances organised by job with the date last furnished kept current, so a deadline calendar runs off records rather than recollection and your attorney gets the backup the same day.
A fair question when you already have a bookkeeper, a family member doing the entry, or a local firm that has always filed the return. Here is the honest answer.
Contractors who were behind, off the bank, or heading into an audit. Same work, different trades.
Built From Scratch
"FinTruction set the accounts up properly first, then cleaned up everything I never entered."
Rescue + Monthly
"They built a custom chart of accounts around how a remodeling company actually runs."
Most Fort Wayne contractors already pay for the right software. The problem is that it was set up by somebody who was not thinking about cost codes, divisions or the timesheet that has to feed both.
We work in QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop daily and we know what a construction file should look like. Setup takes the first week. The value shows up in month fourteen, when the file is still clean because somebody has been maintaining it deliberately.
Not sure what shape your file is really in?
If hours are already being captured on a phone in the field, they should arrive in payroll with the job and cost code attached instead of being retyped off a paper sheet on Monday. That single change removes most coding errors before they happen.
One set of numbers the field and the office both recognize.
Current books only matter if they arrive in a usable form on a predictable date. This is the package a Fort Wayne contractor gets from us, and it lands on the same date in June as it does in January.
Need WIP, over and underbilling and bonding-ready statements on top? That is our Fort Wayne construction accounting service.
Not the county the job is in, which is what most people assume. Indiana county tax is driven by where the employee lived on January 1 of the year. If the employee did not live in an Indiana county on that date but their principal place of work or business was in one, the rate for that county applies instead. Both facts are captured on Form WH-4, which you keep on file rather than send in, and both are locked for the year. So six men on one truck, living in Allen, Whitley, DeKalb, Noble and Wells counties, can carry five different rates on the same job. It is a per-employee setup fact, not a company setting.
Three things, and they compound. The county rate is set once when a man is hired and never revisited, so it drifts as people move. Hours arrive on a paper sheet with a job name but no cost code, so labor lands in a general account and the job report is fiction. And burden is guessed at a round percentage rather than built from real workers compensation, payroll tax and benefit cost, which means every bid is priced off a number nobody has checked. None of that is exotic. It is what happens when payroll is squeezed into a Monday morning by whoever also orders material.
It has to, and it starts on the timesheet rather than in the reports. The same electrician can spend Tuesday on a long contract job and Wednesday on service calls, and those two hours behave nothing alike: one belongs to a contract with retainage and a schedule of values, the other to a ticket that is billed and closed in a week. We code hours to the division, the job and the cost code as they are entered, so the service side is never quietly subsidised by the contract side, and so the sales tax treatment of each side is supported by records rather than by memory.
Only on federal money. Indiana repealed the Common Construction Wage Act effective 1 July 2015, so state and locally funded public works in Fort Wayne carry no state prevailing wage rate and no state certified payroll requirement. Federally funded and federally assisted contracts above 2,000 dollars still fall under the Davis-Bacon Act, with the applicable wage determination, weekly certified payroll and fringe accounting, generally reported on US Department of Labor Form WH-347. Because the repeal removed the state routine, plenty of contractors here have never produced a certified payroll and meet the requirement for the first time on one job. The bookkeeping demand is the weekly cadence.
We have not met a file past saving. Catch-up runs forward from the last month that genuinely reconciled to the bank rather than the last month somebody clicked reconcile. We pull statements forward, recover supplier and subcontractor bills that were never entered, recode transactions to jobs and cost codes, rebuild payroll allocations so labor sits on the right jobs, separate owner draws from job cost, and reconcile to the current month. A Fort Wayne contractor six to nine months behind is usually current within two to four weeks. It is scoped work with a finish date, not an open invoice.
Constantly, and it is entry work rather than judgment work. Whether a job is lump sum or time and materials changes whether you charge the customer tax or owe use tax on the materials you install, and that decision has to be recorded on the job when it opens so purchasing and invoicing follow it. Materials bought without Indiana tax need flagging when they are consumed so the accrual exists before the return is due. We record the contract type at job setup and configure vendor and item defaults so the taxed and untaxed purchases separate themselves. The tax position itself is argued on our Fort Wayne construction accounting page.
Timesheets with hours against a job and a cost code, and a current WH-4 on file for each employee. That is genuinely it, and the second item is the one that gets skipped. From there we process the run, split hours across jobs and divisions, apply the correct county rate per employee, calculate burden from your real insurance and tax cost rather than a rule of thumb, post the labor to job cost, and reconcile the quarterly filings back to the ledger. On a Davis-Bacon job the certified payroll comes out of the same run, so the filed report and the job-cost labor cannot disagree.
By asking for the paperwork before the first payment, not after an injury. Indiana treats a person as an independent contractor for worker compensation purposes where they qualify as one under Internal Revenue Service guidelines, and the Worker Compensation Board operates a clearance certificate process for independent contractors who are not required to carry coverage on themselves. Whatever a subcontractor tells you on the phone, your vendor file needs the certificate or the certificate of insurance on record with an expiry date. We collect it alongside the W-9 and track the expiry, because a lapse mid-job is the case that actually catches people.
The rhythm only works when the books are current. Indiana withholding is remitted with Form WH-1 on the cycle the Department of Revenue assigns you and reconciled annually on Form WH-3, both through INTIME. Quarterly wage and unemployment reporting goes to the Department of Workforce Development, and federal 941s sit alongside them. Being three months behind means every one of those is filed on an estimate and amended later, which costs more in fees and attention than doing it on time ever would. Current books turn the calendar into routine work.
We keep books for contractors across Allen County and northeast Indiana, including Fort Wayne, New Haven, Huntertown, Leo-Cedarville, Auburn, Columbia City, Huntington, Decatur, Bluffton, Kendallville and Warsaw. Everything is remote, so you get construction-specific bookkeeping without paying toward an office you would never visit, and your CPA can be in the file at the same time you are. Start with the free Audit: send the file and your last bank reconciliation and we will tell you how far out it really is. After that it is a flat monthly fee based on transaction volume, active jobs and payroll. Sahil Ahmad, CPA reviews the work.
FinTruction keeps the books for contractors across Indiana. Choose your city for payroll entry, coding, payables and monthly close support in your market.
Bookkeeping is the payroll entry, the coding, the payables and the close. When you need WIP schedules, over and underbilling, bonding-ready statements and the Indiana lump sum versus time and materials position argued properly, that is our construction accounting service for Fort Wayne contractors.
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Working across the state? Construction accounting in Indiana
Send us your QuickBooks file, a recent payroll register and your last bank reconciliation. We will tell you how many months are genuinely out, where the labor is landing, whether the burden rate is real, and what it would take to get current. No charge and no obligation for the Audit.
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