Catch up the backlog, then close every month on a date you can plan around
You are three months behind, and the busy season is the reason. In Madison the exterior calendar runs from spring thaw to the first hard freeze, so between May and November nobody in the office has time to code anything, and by February you are trying to remember what a supply house charge from July was for. Construction bookkeeping in Madison is really a rhythm problem: the work bunches, the coding does not keep up, and the file stops telling you which job made money. We catch the backlog up first, code every cost to a job, and close each month on a date.
On the ground
Wisconsin State Capitol, Madison
Most contractors who call us are not shopping. They are behind. A bookkeeper left, the season ran long, or the CPA will not file until the file is defensible. Catch-up comes first, on a stated schedule, and we tell you plainly which months we reconstructed and which are genuinely reconciled.
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 →
Job costing is not a report you run at the end. It is several hundred small decisions a month about which job and which cost code a charge belongs to. A Madison contractor buying at the same supply house for a campus job, a Fitchburg lab fit-out and a Sun Prairie subdivision needs those three streams separated at entry, not untangled later.
Payables and receivables in construction carry conditions that a general ledger does not know about on its own. A pay application has retainage inside it. A subcontractor payment depends on a lien waiver and a current certificate of insurance. We handle both sides so the balances mean something.
Labor is the number most often wrong in a contractor's job cost, because gross wages get posted and burden does not. On federally funded Madison work there is a second problem: the certified payroll you file weekly and the labor sitting on the job have to be the same hours and the same rates.
A close that lands whenever it lands is not a close. We commit to a delivery date each month and hold it through the busy season, which is exactly when most Madison contractors stop closing. What you get is a short pack you can read in ten minutes, not a data dump.
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.
Madison generates an unusual amount of bookkeeping work for its size, because a Dane County contractor rarely runs one kind of job. In a single month a mid-size firm here can be invoicing a State of Wisconsin agency facility, a University of Wisconsin research or residence hall project, a hospital fit-out, a private biotech or office build in the University Research Park or the Fitchburg corridor, and a run of houses in Sun Prairie or Waunakee. Each of those owners bills differently, holds retainage differently, and asks for backup in a different format.
The freeze is what turns that variety into a bookkeeping problem. Site, concrete, asphalt, masonry and roofing work in Madison is compressed into roughly seven or eight usable months, with spring weight restrictions on the front end and frost depth governing when footings can go in. Transaction volume triples in the season while office capacity stays flat, so coding slips first, reconciliation slips second, and by November the file has months of uncoded charges sitting in an undeposited or ask-my-accountant bucket. Nobody planned that. It is simply what happens when the work and the paperwork share the same short calendar.
The other Madison-specific pressure is that the same purchase is not always taxed the same way. A contractor buying identical material for a City of Madison facility, a Dane County building and a private condominium is exempt on one and taxable on the others, and that decision is made at the purchase order by whoever is standing at the counter. Getting it wrong quietly moves money in both directions, and it is not the kind of thing a year-end review catches.
None of this needs a bigger office. It needs the coding decided once, applied at entry, and a close that actually lands each month. That is what this service is. When you also need the analysis layer on top, our construction accounting in Madison covers WIP, over and underbilling, bonding support and tax planning.
Dane County contractors run a short exterior season against a mix of state agency, University of Wisconsin, hospital, biotech and residential work. That combination produces high transaction volume in a narrow window and a purchase that is taxable on one job and exempt on the next. A general bookkeeper codes it to Materials and moves on.
Wisconsin Sales and Use Tax on Materials: In Wisconsin a contractor performing real property construction is generally the consumer of the materials it furnishes and installs, so sales tax is paid to the supplier at purchase rather than charged on the improvement. The distinction that catches people is tangible personal property that keeps its character as personal property after installation, where the contractor is acting as a retailer on that item. The combined rate in Madison is 5.5 percent, being 5 percent Wisconsin state tax plus the 0.5 percent Dane County tax. Where a supplier bills without tax, Wisconsin use tax is owed and must be accrued at bill entry.
The Section 77.54(9m) Exempt Entity Exemption: Wisconsin Statute 77.54(9m) exempts building materials sold to a construction contractor where the materials are transferred to a qualifying exempt entity and become part of a facility in Wisconsin owned by that entity, which covers a large share of University of Wisconsin, State of Wisconsin, City of Madison, Dane County and school district work. The contractor claims it by providing Form S-211 to the supplier noting the exemption under section 77.54(9m). A facility does not include a highway, street or road. Because the same item is exempt on one job and taxable on the next, this belongs in the purchasing and coding workflow rather than in a year-end adjustment.
Prevailing Wage and Certified Payroll: Wisconsin repealed its state prevailing wage law covering state and local public works, so prevailing wage exposure for a Madison contractor now comes primarily from the federal Davis-Bacon Act and the Davis-Bacon Related Acts on federally funded work. In this market that means transit and airport projects, HUD-assisted housing, and federally funded construction on the University of Wisconsin campus. Where it applies, certified payroll is a weekly record keeping obligation, typically on Form WH-347 with a Copeland Act statement of compliance. The filed payroll and the labor cost sitting on the job have to agree, which is why we produce both from one payroll run.
Dwelling Contractor Certification and Renewal Costs: Residential builders and remodelers in Wisconsin need a Dwelling Contractor Certification for the business and a Dwelling Contractor Qualifier credential held by an individual, both administered by the Department of Safety and Professional Services. Renewal of the qualifier credential requires 12 hours of approved continuing education every two years, and since November 2022 four of those hours must cover construction laws, codes, contracts, liability and risk management. Those renewal fees, course costs, City of Madison permit fees, bond premiums and insurance belong in overhead where they feed your burden rate, not scattered across job expense where they distort job margin.
Worker Classification under Wisconsin Statute 103.06: Wisconsin Statute 103.06 authorises the Department of Workforce Development to conduct worker classification compliance investigations at construction worksites and to issue stop-work orders, with a daily forfeiture for violating an order. That makes the 1099 versus W-2 question an operational risk in construction specifically, not just a tax filing question. We treat it as a bookkeeping control: no subcontractor gets paid without a W-9, a current certificate of insurance and a signed agreement in the vendor record, and labor-only vendors are flagged for review rather than discovered in January.
Wisconsin Construction Lien Law and Payment Terms: Chapter 779 of the Wisconsin Statutes governs construction lien rights, and the deadlines run from dates your records have to be able to prove, in particular the last date labor or materials were furnished on each project. Wisconsin Statute 779.135(3) also voids provisions making an owner's payment to a prime contractor a condition precedent to paying a subcontractor, so a pay-if-paid clause is unenforceable here while pay-when-paid timing is not. We are not attorneys and we do not file notices. We keep unpaid balances organized by job with accurate furnishing dates so your attorney is working from records rather than from memory.
Retainage as Its Own Receivable: Retainage on Madison institutional and public work is commonly held for months after substantial completion, and if it is entered as part of an ordinary receivable it stops being visible the moment the job goes quiet. We post the withheld portion of every pay application to a separate retainage receivable by contract, note the release condition, and mirror the treatment for retainage you hold from subcontractors. That produces a real retainage aging and keeps your balance sheet from overstating what is actually collectible in the next 30 days.
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 contractor bookkeeping across Dane County, from site and concrete crews chasing the frost window to mechanical and interior specialists working University of Wisconsin research buildings and Fitchburg lab space.
Behind on the Books in Madison?
Get Your Free AuditA fair question when you already have a bookkeeper, a spouse doing the coding, or a firm that files 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 Madison contractors do not need different software. They need the file they already pay for set up for construction and connected to the field system, so coding is a by-product of work that already happened instead of a second evening job.
The QuickBooks files we inherit in Dane County usually share the same faults: jobs entered as customers with no sub-customer layer, no cost code structure, retainage buried in receivables, owner draws mixed into job expense, and bank feed rules quietly miscoding a supplier month after month. We repair the file rather than starting a new one, so you keep your history.
Is your QuickBooks file the reason you are behind?
If your crews already log time and your project managers already enter commitments and change orders in a platform, that data should reach the books without anyone retyping it. Retyping is where the coding errors come from, and it is the first thing to be skipped in July.
One set of job numbers that the field and the office both recognize.
Once the coding is right and the close holds a date, the monthly pack stops being a formality you file unread. This is what a Madison contractor actually uses it for:
See what this looks like in practice in our construction bookkeeping case studies, or start with a free books Audit.
Yes, and catch-up is usually the first thing we do rather than a side project. We take the file from the last reliably reconciled month, rebuild bank and credit card reconciliations forward, code the backlog of supply house charges, fuel, equipment rental and subcontractor bills to the jobs they were actually spent on, and reconcile payroll to what was filed. Then we tell you honestly which months can be trusted and which were reconstructed from partial records. Most Dane County contractors who come to us behind are behind for the same reason: the exterior season is short and nobody had time between April and November.
It depends on the funding source, not on the fact that the owner is a public body. Wisconsin repealed its state prevailing wage law covering state and local public works, so a purely state or municipally funded project in Madison generally carries no state prevailing wage or state certified payroll obligation. Federal money is the trigger that remains. Federally funded work, which in this market includes transit, airport, HUD-assisted housing and federally funded research construction on the University of Wisconsin campus, falls under the federal Davis-Bacon Act and its related acts, requiring weekly certified payroll and a signed statement of compliance under the Copeland Act. We prepare those records from the same payroll run that feeds job cost.
In Wisconsin a contractor performing real property construction is generally treated as the consumer of the materials it furnishes and installs, so sales tax is paid to the supplier at purchase and the finished improvement is not taxed to the customer. The exception matters: when a contractor sells and installs tangible personal property that keeps its character as personal property after installation, the contractor is acting as a retailer on that item and tax applies to the sale. In Madison the combined rate is 5.5 percent, being the 5 percent Wisconsin state tax plus the 0.5 percent Dane County tax. When a supplier does not charge it, Wisconsin use tax is owed and has to be accrued, which is a coding decision at bill entry.
Often yes. Wisconsin Statute 77.54(9m) exempts building materials sold to a construction contractor when the materials are transferred to a qualifying exempt entity and become part of a facility in Wisconsin owned by that entity. Governmental units and certain qualifying nonprofits are covered, and the contractor claims it by giving the supplier Form S-211 marked as exempt under section 77.54(9m). Note that a facility does not include a highway, street or road. The bookkeeping consequence is that the same pipe or panel is taxable on one job and exempt on the next, so the exemption has to be applied at the purchase order and recorded against the job, not sorted out at year end.
We fix it in almost every case, because a fresh file throws away your history and your comparatives. A typical Madison contractor file we inherit has jobs set up as customers with no sub-customer structure, no cost code list, retainage sitting inside ordinary accounts receivable, owner draws mixed into job expense, and bank feed rules that have been quietly miscoding a supply house for two years. We rebuild the chart of accounts and the item and cost code list for construction, repoint the historical transactions where it is defensible to do so, and document what we changed so your CPA is not guessing.
It changes the rhythm of the whole year. The Madison exterior calendar is compressed by frost, and site, concrete, asphalt, masonry and roofing revenue bunches into roughly seven or eight months while overhead runs for twelve. Wisconsin Department of Transportation seasonal weight restrictions during the spring thaw delay hauling at the front end, and frost depth requirements affect when footings can go in. In the books that shows up as revenue and cost landing unevenly, crews laid off and rehired against your Wisconsin unemployment insurance account, equipment sitting idle that should not be costed to a job, and winter snow and service revenue that belongs in a separate income stream from contract revenue.
By treating it as a bookkeeping control rather than a January problem. Wisconsin Statute 103.06 authorises the Department of Workforce Development to run worker classification compliance investigations at construction worksites and to issue stop-work orders, with a daily forfeiture for violating an order, so misclassification in construction is enforced on site and not just at audit. We set the vendor record up so a subcontractor cannot be paid without a W-9, a certificate of insurance and a signed agreement on file, we flag vendors whose pattern looks like labor only, and we keep the 1099-NEC totals reconciled to the ledger through the year.
At invoice entry, which is the whole point. Retainage that is only discovered when the job closes is retainage nobody chased. When a pay application goes out we record the gross earned amount and post the withheld portion to a separate retainage receivable by contract, with the release condition and expected date noted, and we do the same in reverse for retainage you are holding from your own subcontractors. That gives you a retainage aging alongside the ordinary accounts receivable aging, and it stops your balance sheet from overstating collectible receivables to a bank or a surety reading it closely.
This page is the daily and monthly work: coding transactions to the right job and cost code, bank and credit card reconciliations, accounts payable and receivable, payroll entry, certified payroll records and a monthly close that lands on a stated date. The construction accounting service for Madison contractors is what sits on top: work in progress schedules, over and underbilling analysis, percentage of completion revenue, bonding and lender packages and tax planning. Analysis is only as good as the coding underneath it, so most contractors who are behind should start here.
Start with the free Audit. Send us access to your current QuickBooks file and your last month-end reports, and we will tell you how far behind the file actually is, what is coded wrong, and what catch-up would involve. No obligation. After that it is a flat monthly fee based on transaction volume, active jobs, payroll frequency and whether certified payroll is in scope, so a question in the middle of the month does not start a clock. Sahil Ahmad, CPA reviews the work.
FinTruction handles construction bookkeeping across Wisconsin. Pick your city below for job-cost coding, reconciliations and a monthly close in your market.
This page is the day-to-day work: coding, reconciliations, AP and AR, payroll entry and a monthly close that lands on a date. If what you actually need is a WIP schedule, an over and underbilling read, bonding support or tax planning, that is the accounting service.
Construction Accounting in Madison
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Working across the state? Construction accounting in Wisconsin
Send us access to your QuickBooks file and your last month-end reports. We will tell you which months are genuinely reconciled, what is coded to the wrong job, and what catch-up would take. No charge and no obligation for the Audit.
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