Timesheets entered so the payroll record and the job cost tell the same story
Nobody argues about apprentice hours until somebody adds them up. On a California public works contract of thirty thousand dollars or more you owe one hour of apprentice work for every five journeyman hours, a dispatch request three business days before you need the apprentice, and a training fund contribution by the fifteenth of the following month. For a Long Beach contractor moving between Harbor Department, school district and city jobs, all three come out of the timesheets somebody enters on Friday. FinTruction runs that payroll entry, the job-cost coding, the payables and the monthly close, so the ratio is a number you already know.
On the ground
The Queen Mary at her berth in Long Beach Harbor, California
A general bookkeeper posts payroll as a single labor expense and moves on. On public work in this city the same hours have to produce a job cost figure, a classification record, an apprentice ratio and a monthly training fund contribution, and all four have to agree. That is a data capture problem at the timesheet, not a reporting problem at the year end.
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.
This is the heaviest weekly task a Long Beach contractor carries, and everything else depends on it being right. We enter hours by day, job, cost code and craft classification, keep apprentice and journeyman totals running as the project goes, and reconcile the payroll register to what landed in job cost every single week. Start with the free books Audit if you want to know whether your labor is reaching the jobs at all.
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 →
Compliance paperwork stops being frightening once it is produced as a by-product of the books. We keep the award and dispatch requests filed against the job, isolate hours in apprenticeable crafts on covered projects as payroll is posted, and prepare the training fund contribution so it goes out by the middle of the following month rather than surfacing in an inquiry.
If the last month that truly reconciles was two quarters ago, that is where we start. We work forward from it, recode what was guessed at, and rebuild the file so it matches how a contractor actually works. On public jobs we also reconstruct hours by craft, because the compliance record has to be rebuilt from the same data.
A crew that spends Tuesday on a wharf and Thursday on a tenant improvement inland generates two very different cost pictures out of one week of payroll. We code costs to the project and phase they belong to as they arrive, so job costing in Long Beach reports what each type of work actually consumes instead of blending them into an average that describes neither.
Around the payroll sits everything else: supplier and subcontractor bills, progress draws, retainage held both ways, and a month that has to actually close. We enter the bills against the commitments they belong to, record each pay application accurately, and deliver a reconciled package on the same date every month whether or not you chase it.
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 |
Long Beach carries an unusually deep public works pipeline for a city its size. The Harbor Department runs its own capital program on the tidelands, the airport and the city run theirs, the school district builds on bond money, and regional transportation and utility corridors cut through on top. A contractor here can go years without a stretch where none of the active work is a public work, and once a contract passes 30,000 dollars the record keeping obligations attach whether or not the office is set up for them.
Those obligations all draw on one source: the hours. The apprentice to journeyman ratio is computed from hours. The training fund contribution is computed from hours in apprenticeable crafts. The classification a worker is paid under is applied by the hour. Job cost is built from hours. Four different outputs, one input, and the input is a piece of paper a foreman fills in at the end of a long day. When that paper is a weekly total with a job name written across the top, every one of the four outputs is a reconstruction.
This is why the failure mode here is so consistent. The work is fine, the crews are good, and the office is entering payroll as one lump because that is what the software was set up to accept. Six months later nobody can prove the ratio, the training fund has not been remitted since spring, labor on the job cost report is a company-wide average, and the estimate to complete on every open project is quietly wrong in the same direction.
None of that requires a bigger office to fix. It requires the entry format to change once, somebody to check it weekly, and the monthly obligations to sit on a calendar rather than in somebody's head. That is what this service is.
The Department of Industrial Relations states that public works contracts valued at 30,000 dollars or more must employ apprentices, unless the specific craft or trade does not require apprentices under the prevailing wage determination. The obligation is expressed as a ratio: one hour of apprentice work for every five hours performed by a journeyman level worker. Contractors also have to provide workers compensation coverage for apprentices. The Division of Apprenticeship Standards can grant exemptions where appropriate. Nothing about that can be answered from a weekly payroll total, which is why it becomes a bookkeeping design question long before it becomes a compliance question.
Two forms carry the process. The DAS 140, Public Works Contract Award Information, reports the award for each apprenticeable craft required on the project to the applicable apprenticeship committees. The DAS 142, Request for Dispatch of an Apprentice, is how you actually ask for an apprentice, and the Division of Apprenticeship Standards states it should be submitted at least three business days before apprentices are required. Keeping copies and dates attached to the job in your records matters, because the file needs to show a request was made even where a committee could not dispatch anybody.
Contractors on public works must make training fund contributions in the amount set by the applicable prevailing wage rate, paid either to an approved apprenticeship program or to the California Apprenticeship Council. Contributions to the Council are reported on form CAC-2, and the Division of Apprenticeship Standards states training funds are due and payable by the 15th of the month after the month the work was performed, covering all hours worked by journeymen and apprentices in apprenticeable crafts, including overtime. That is a recurring monthly remittance driven entirely by payroll data, and it is one of the obligations we most often find has quietly lapsed in a file we inherit.
A prevailing wage determination is a total package, made up of a basic hourly rate plus employer payments for items such as health and welfare, pension, vacation and holiday, and training. Employer payments actually made to bona fide plans generally count toward the package, and what is not paid to a plan has to reach the worker as wages instead. That means the plan payments are not a side administrative matter, they are part of the wage calculation, and they have to be recorded per craft and per hour to show the package was met. We record them that way rather than as a lump benefits expense.
California computes overtime by the day as well as by the week. Hours beyond eight in a workday are premium hours, hours beyond twelve are double time, and the seventh consecutive workday in a workweek carries its own premium structure. Public works determinations layer their own overtime requirements by craft on top. The bookkeeping consequence is that a blended labor rate posted to a job is very often wrong, because the same total hours cost different amounts depending on how they fell across the days. We post premium hours to the job that caused them.
Long Beach is a charter city with its own business licensing and its own building department, and neighboring cities such as Signal Hill, Lakewood and Seal Beach each administer their own. A contractor working across that patch can end up holding several municipal registrations with different renewal dates and different fee bases, and you should confirm your own obligations with each city because the rules are not uniform. On the bookkeeping side we keep renewals on a visible calendar, code the fees to overhead where they belong instead of losing them in miscellaneous expense, and tag revenue with the city the work was performed in.
We work with contractors across Long Beach and the Gateway Cities, from pile driving and marine crews on the harbor to school and civic builders inland and the trades that follow them.
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Contractors who were behind, off the bank, or heading into an audit. Same work, different trades.
Rescue + Monthly
"They built a custom chart of accounts around how a remodeling company actually runs."
$1M+ Rebuild
"FinTruction rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up, with real job costing, WIP, and retainage."
Most of the entry burden on a Long Beach contractor is retyping something a crew already recorded in the field. Connecting time capture and project management to the accounting file removes whole categories of typing, and what is left gets done properly and once.
The single most common defect we find is a file where payroll posts to one wage account. Nothing reaches a job, no classification exists, and every labor question has to be answered from outside the accounting system. Rebuilding that is the first hour of real work in most engagements.
Not sure how bad the file is? Find out first.
If crews are already logging time and change orders on a phone, the office should not be retyping it from a paper copy on Monday. Connecting the two is what makes daily classification-level entry realistic instead of aspirational.
One set of hours, entered once, that payroll and job cost both read.
Clean books are not the deliverable. These are, and they arrive on the same date every month whether or not you ask:
See what a rebuilt set of books looks like in our construction bookkeeping case studies. When you want WIP schedules and bonding-ready statements on top of them, that is construction accounting for Long Beach contractors.
On public works contracts of 30,000 dollars or more, the Department of Industrial Relations requires contractors to employ registered apprentices at a rate of one hour of apprentice work for every five hours performed by a journeyman level worker in an apprenticeable craft, unless the craft is not one the prevailing wage determination requires apprentices for. That is not a policy statement, it is arithmetic on your timesheets, and it is measured across the project rather than guessed at week by week. If nobody is adding the hours up as they are entered, the first time anyone knows the ratio is short is when it is too late to fix by working apprentices.
Two, and they do different jobs. The DAS 140 reports contract award information for each apprenticeable craft required on the project, sent to the applicable apprenticeship committees. The DAS 142 is the request for dispatch of an apprentice, and the Division of Apprenticeship Standards states it should be submitted at least three business days before apprentices are required on site. Three business days is the part contractors miss, because the crew decides on a Monday that they need somebody Tuesday. We keep the award and dispatch requests logged against the job with dates and copies attached, so the file shows you asked even when a committee could not dispatch.
Generally yes on public works. Contractors are required to make training fund contributions in the amount the prevailing wage determination sets, paid either to an approved apprenticeship program or to the California Apprenticeship Council. Where the money goes to the Council it is reported on form CAC-2, and the Division of Apprenticeship Standards states the training funds are due and payable by the 15th of the month after the month the work was performed. Contributions are owed on all hours worked by journeymen and apprentices in apprenticeable crafts, including overtime hours. It is a small number per hour and a large number over a year, and it is one of the most commonly missed monthly obligations we find in a new file.
By producing it from the payroll register rather than rebuilding it from job files. Every timesheet line carries the job, the craft classification and whether the job is a public work, so the hours in an apprenticeable craft on covered jobs are already isolated when payroll is posted. At the close we total those hours, apply the contribution rate from the applicable determination, reconcile the total to what was actually paid, and file it before the 15th. The same hours have already landed in job cost, so the contribution shows on the project that generated it rather than in a general payroll expense account.
The timesheet has to record the job, the cost code, the craft classification and the hours for each day separately, not a weekly total with a job name written on top. Once a week is entered as a lump, nothing downstream can be produced correctly: the apprentice ratio is unprovable, the prevailing wage classification cannot be applied per hour, and the job cost report shows labor on the wrong project. We set up the entry format, train whoever fills it in, and check it weekly rather than discovering the problem when a report is due.
California computes overtime daily as well as weekly, so hours beyond eight in a workday are premium hours, hours beyond twelve are paid at double time, and the seventh consecutive workday in a workweek carries its own premium. Public works determinations set their own overtime requirements by craft on top of that. The practical effect is that two crews with identical weekly hours can cost very different amounts depending on how those hours fell across the days. If payroll posts a single blended labor number to the job, your cost per unit is fiction. We post the premium portion to the job that caused it so the estimate to complete is built on real rates.
Long Beach is a charter city that runs its own business licensing and its own building department, and the Gateway Cities around it, including Signal Hill, Lakewood and Seal Beach, each administer their own. A contractor working across that patch can end up carrying several municipal registrations with different renewal dates and different fee bases. Verify your own obligations with each city, since the rules vary. What we do on the bookkeeping side is keep the renewals on a calendar somebody watches, code the fees to overhead rather than losing them in miscellaneous expense, and tag revenue with the city the work was performed in so any receipts-based filing comes off the records.
Yes, and catch-up is how most contractors start with us. We work forward from the last month that genuinely reconciles: bank, card and line of credit accounts brought back into balance, uncoded supplier charges pushed onto the right job and cost code, subcontractor bills entered against the correct contract, retainage separated out of receivables, and payroll re-tied to the jobs and classifications the hours were actually worked under. Most contractors three to nine months behind are current within two to four weeks. On public work we also reconstruct the hours by craft, because that is what the compliance record has to be rebuilt from.
Bookkeeping is the production work: entering timesheets and payroll, coding every cost to a job and cost code, entering supplier and subcontractor bills, recording draws and retainage, reconciling every account and closing the month on a fixed date. Accounting is the layer built on top, including WIP schedules, percentage of completion revenue, burden rate analysis, bonding-ready statements and tax planning. Most Long Beach contractors who are behind need the bookkeeping first, because none of the analysis means anything on records nobody trusts. See construction accounting in Long Beach for the accounting side.
Start with the free Audit. Send your QuickBooks file, a list of active jobs and a recent payroll register, and we will tell you which months actually reconcile, whether labor is landing on the jobs at all, whether the hours by craft would support an apprenticeship or prevailing wage review, and what a catch-up would take. No obligation. After that it is a flat monthly fee based on transaction volume, number of active jobs, payroll size and whether catch-up work is needed first. Sahil Ahmad, CPA reviews the work.
FinTruction handles construction bookkeeping for contractors across California. Select your city for catch-up work, payroll entry, job-cost coding and a monthly close in your market.
This page is the production work: timesheet and payroll entry, job-cost coding, payables, receivables and the monthly close. When you need WIP schedules, burden rate analysis, bonding-ready statements and tax planning built on those records, that is the accounting service.
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