Draws posted, retainage tracked, and a real monthly close for Nashville contractors
On a Nashville high-rise or hotel job the money moves in draws. You submit a pay application, the owner holds back retainage, the next draw goes out before the last one is even posted, and the retainage line keeps climbing on a spreadsheet nobody has touched in weeks. With HCA-driven healthcare campuses, Broadway hotels, and downtown towers all billing on progress schedules at once, the draw and retainage entries are the first thing to slip. By the time a lender or bonding company asks how much is still held across your contracts, the honest number is buried under three months of pay apps that were never entered. A general bookkeeper records a draw as one lump deposit and never breaks out retainage receivable, so your balance sheet understates what you are actually owed. FinTruction records construction the way it really bills: every progress draw posted to the right job and phase, retainage receivable and payable tracked contract by contract, subcontractor bills and AP coded to the job, AR and reconciliations current, and a real monthly close delivered on a fixed date. We work with general contractors, concrete and site crews, mechanical and electrical trades, remodelers, and commercial builders across Davidson County and the greater Nashville metro.
On the ground
Nashville construction bookkeeping
Bookkeeping for a Nashville construction company looks nothing like bookkeeping for a storefront or an office. Between multi-draw high-rise and hotel billing, retainage held for months, subcontractor payments spread across dozens of vendors, and payroll that has to land on the right job, a general bookkeeper simply posts it wrong. Accurate books are the foundation your lender, surety, and CPA all stand on.
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.
Nashville runs one of the hottest construction markets in the country, and the pace is exactly what buries a contractor's books. HCA Healthcare and Vanderbilt-driven medical campuses, a wave of Broadway and downtown hotels, the Oracle campus on the East Bank, the new Titans stadium, and a skyline of high-rise towers mean most builders here are carrying several large, phased jobs at once.
Every one of those jobs bills in draws. Pay applications go out, retainage gets withheld, subcontractor invoices stack up, material runs and equipment rentals land daily, and payroll has to be split across projects. On progress-billed work the draw and retainage entries are the ones that slip first, and a single tower or hospital wing can put a month of pay apps behind before anyone notices.
When the books fall behind, the damage is quiet but expensive. Retainage receivable goes untracked, so your balance sheet understates what you are owed. Cash decisions get made on stale numbers, miscoded costs hide which jobs are actually losing money, and the year-end handoff to a CPA turns into a cleanup project. The work was profitable; the record-keeping is what put the company at risk.
FinTruction keeps Nashville contractors out of that hole. We match the pace of the market with a disciplined monthly process, so your draws are posted, your retainage is tracked contract by contract, and your books stay accurate, current, and coded to the job.
Accurate books begin with putting every dollar against the right job, phase, and cost code the day it hits. We handle daily entry so your QuickBooks stays current and you can see where each Nashville job actually stands instead of finding out at month-end.
If your file is a mess or you are months behind, we fix it. Plenty of Nashville contractors come to us with miscoded costs, retainage buried inside lump deposits, and no real job costing. We rebuild the file for construction and bring every account current so the numbers hold up again.
Nashville contractors run dozens of subcontractor and supplier relationships across every project. We keep AP organized, code each bill to the right job, and stay ahead of payment schedules so you protect vendor relationships, dodge late fees, and reach year-end with clean 1099 records.
Getting paid keeps the lights on, and on Nashville high-rise, hotel, and healthcare work that means multi-draw billing with retainage held for months. We post every progress draw and AIA pay application accurately, record retainage receivable by contract, and watch the aging so nothing slips between draws.
Labor is the biggest line for most Nashville builders, and it only tells the truth when it is allocated to the right job. We record payroll, split labor across projects and cost codes, and keep the documentation federal work demands under Davis-Bacon.
Every month you get a clean, construction-formatted statement package on a fixed date, reconciled and ready for your CPA, bank, or surety. No more waiting weeks to learn how the business actually did.
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 →
Our construction bookkeeping supports contractors and specialty trades across Davidson, Williamson, Rutherford, Wilson, and Sumner counties. Whether you run a five-person crew or manage healthcare-campus and high-rise buildouts, we keep your books accurate and job-level clean.
Are You a Contractor in Nashville?
Get Clean Books and Financial ClarityA 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 |
Contractors who pay a subcontractor 600 dollars or more in a year must issue a 1099-NEC. Our process records every subcontractor payment by vendor and job all year and collects W-9s up front, so year-end 1099 filing is accurate rather than a last-minute scramble across deep Nashville subcontractor chains.
Tennessee applies a 7 percent state sales tax on construction materials, and Davidson County local tax brings the combined rate to 9.25 percent. We separate taxable material purchases from labor and subcontractor costs in your records and keep exemption documentation, so use-tax exposure is captured correctly instead of surfacing in an audit.
Under Tennessee lien law, subcontractors and suppliers generally must serve a Notice of Nonpayment within 90 days to preserve lien rights. Our bookkeeping maintains project-level records of contract amounts, billings, and payments received so unpaid balances are easy to spot and notices go out inside the deadline.
The Tennessee Board for Licensing Contractors requires a state license for work valued at 25,000 dollars or more, and Metro Nashville adds permit and inspection requirements within Davidson County. We keep the clean financial records that support license applications and upgrades and track permit-related costs inside your project budgets.
Tennessee has no state prevailing-wage law, but federally funded Nashville work falls under the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires prevailing wages and certified payroll reporting. Our bookkeeping keeps wage rates, hours by project, and fringe payments recorded so certified payroll can be produced without a last-minute rush.
We work only with construction companies, so we post your books the way contractors actually bill, not the way a general bookkeeper guesses.
FinTruction runs your construction bookkeeping in Nashville on the software you already use. We connect your accounting platform, field and project management tools, and payroll so transactions flow into accurate books without double entry.
We set up and maintain QuickBooks Online and Desktop specifically for Nashville contractors, so job costing, retainage, and progress invoicing are handled right from the first entry rather than bolted on later.
Need QuickBooks Cleaned Up for Construction?
We connect the tools your Nashville crews use in the field to your books so draws, costs, and payments flow through without manual re-entry.
Every month, on a fixed date. Nashville contractors running healthcare-campus phases, Broadway hotel buildouts, and downtown high-rise work post too many draws, subcontractor bills, and material charges to leave the books for a quarter. Our monthly close reconciles every bank and card account, checks job-cost coding, brings AP and AR current, updates retainage positions, and hands you a construction-formatted statement package so you are never guessing where a job sits.
Yes, and it is how a lot of Nashville contractors start with us. We rebuild the chart of accounts for construction, fix miscoded costs and stale undeposited funds, set up job-costing classes and items, correct retainage and progress-draw entries that were booked as lump deposits, and reconcile back through the year. From there a disciplined monthly process keeps the file accurate.
Yes, this is central to what we do for Nashville builders. On phased high-rise, hotel, and healthcare work the money arrives in draws with retainage withheld for months, so each pay application has to be posted to the right job and phase and the retainage receivable recorded as it is held. We track retainage payable on your subcontractor holdbacks too and follow release schedules so your balance sheet shows what you are actually owed across every contract.
Yes. We collect W-9s up front, record every subcontractor payment against the correct job and vendor all year, and flag anyone paid $600 or more so 1099-NEC filing in January is accurate instead of a reconstruction. Because Nashville subcontractor chains run deep on large jobs, we keep that vendor-by-vendor payment history tight throughout the year.
Catch-up bookkeeping is a core service. We reconcile forward from your last clean month, recode transactions to the right jobs and cost codes, sort out subcontractor and material payments, rebuild retainage and draw entries, and hand your CPA a clean set of books. Most Nashville contractors who are three to nine months behind are current within two to four weeks with no disruption to the field.
Tennessee applies a 7% state sales tax on construction materials, and with the Davidson County local add-on the combined rate reaches 9.25%. We separate taxable material purchases from labor and subcontractor costs at the transaction level and keep the documentation for exempt purchases, so use-tax exposure is recorded correctly in your books rather than surfacing during an audit.
We work with contractors across Davidson, Williamson, Rutherford, Wilson, and Sumner counties, including Nashville, Franklin, Brentwood, Murfreesboro, Hendersonville, Mt Juliet, Gallatin, and Lebanon. Our bookkeeping is fully remote, so we support builders anywhere in the greater Nashville metro without needing to visit your office.
Bookkeeping is the day-to-day work: coding costs to jobs, posting draws and retainage, reconciling accounts, managing AP and AR, and producing monthly statements. Accounting builds on those books with WIP reporting, revenue recognition, franchise and excise tax planning, and CFO-level analysis. Many Nashville contractors start with bookkeeping to get accurate, current records, then add construction accounting in Nashville as they chase bigger jobs and more bonding capacity. We provide both.
FinTruction provides construction bookkeeping and accounting across major cities in Tennessee. Select your city to learn more about our contractor bookkeeping and job costing services in your area.
Past the day-to-day books, we also run job costing, WIP schedules, tax planning, and CFO support for Nashville contractors chasing bigger work and more bonding room.
Construction Accounting in Nashville
Nearby
Memphis contractors
Nearby
Knoxville contractors
Nearby
Chattanooga contractors
If you are searching for construction bookkeeping in Nashville, QuickBooks cleanup, or catch-up bookkeeping to get your draws, retainage, and job costs back on track, FinTruction is ready to help your business gain financial clarity.
Looking for professional construction accounting in Nashville? Fill out the short form below and our contractor bookkeeping team will contact you within 24 hours.
