Catch-up, clean job-cost coding, and a month that actually closes
Most San Francisco contractors do not fall behind because the work slowed down. One job carries a gross receipts filing, a health care expenditure calculated on hours worked inside city limits, several union trust remittances, a certified payroll, and a pile of supplier charges nobody has coded. Miss three weeks and nobody can say which job made money. FinTruction runs construction bookkeeping for San Francisco contractors: every cost posted to a job and cost code, payroll hours captured by jurisdiction, a QuickBooks file rebuilt when it no longer matches how you work, and the month closed on a fixed date.
On the ground
Alamo Square Victorians and the downtown skyline, San Francisco, California
If your last reconciled month was two quarters ago, this is where we start. We work forward from the last month that balances, recode the transactions that were guessed at, and rebuild the file so a San Francisco contractor can read it. Nothing else on this page matters until the underlying records are true. Start with the free books Audit and you will know the size of the job before you commit to anything.
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 in San Francisco lives or dies on data entry. A tower crane hour, a street-use permit, a night differential and a staging yard across the bridge are all real project costs, and they are the exact costs a generalist drops into a general expense account. We code them to the project the week they happen so job costing in San Francisco reflects what city work actually costs you.
Payroll is the heaviest weekly bookkeeping task a San Francisco contractor carries. Hours have to land on a job, on a cost code, on a craft classification and on a jurisdiction, because the city measures obligations by hours worked inside its limits. Then the fringes have to be remitted to several trust funds in several formats. We run it as one process so the numbers cannot disagree with each other.
A mid-size San Francisco general contractor can run several hundred vendor and subcontractor bills a month across a handful of jobs. We enter them against the right contract, hold the ones missing a lien release or an insurance certificate, record each progress draw and AIA G702 and G703 application accurately, and book retainage as its own receivable the day the invoice goes out rather than discovering it at closeout.
San Francisco contractors do not have one deadline a year, they have a calendar: business registration renewal, gross receipts filing and estimated payments, the annual health care reporting form, quarterly payroll returns, monthly trust remittances and weekly certified payroll. We run the close and the calendar together, so the month is reconciled and nothing arrives as a surprise letter.
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.
San Francisco stacks more recurring local obligations on a contractor than almost any city in the country, and nearly all of them are administered out of payroll and accounts payable. A general bookkeeper does not know that hours worked inside city limits carry their own consequences, or that a fixture is coded differently from a material. That is how a file quietly stops being usable.
San Francisco produces an unusually high number of accounting entries per dollar built. The work is dense and vertical: podium and high-rise residential, office and laboratory tenant improvement in SoMa and Mission Bay, soft-story and voluntary seismic retrofit across the older housing stock, hotel and restaurant fit-out, hospital and university projects, and rehabilitation of buildings that have been standing since before the 1906 fire. On a constrained lot there is no laydown area, so material arrives in small deliveries, equipment is rented by the day, and every one of those is a separate bill somebody has to code to a job.
Then there is the local rulebook, and this is the part that catches out contractors who moved in from elsewhere in the Bay Area. The City and County of San Francisco runs its own business registration and gross receipts tax, its own labor ordinances covering health care expenditure and paid sick leave measured on hours worked in the city, and its own compliance regime on city-funded construction. None of that is annual paperwork. It is a monthly and quarterly rhythm that has to be fed from payroll and accounts payable, which means it is bookkeeping.
Add high union density and the volume doubles again. A single crew can generate remittance reports to health, pension, annuity, vacation and training trusts every month, each with a different form and a different rate per hour. Miss the pattern for a few months and the fringes stop matching payroll, the fund audit finds it, and the job cost that told you the project was profitable turns out to have been understating labor the whole time.
This is why so many San Francisco contractors we meet are not in trouble on the jobsite. They are three to nine months behind in the office, running the business on a bank balance instead of a job cost report, and waiting on an accountant who will not file until the books are usable. Getting current is the fix, and it is a shorter job than it looks from inside the backlog.
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 work with contractors across the city and the peninsula, from soft-story retrofit crews in the Mission and the Richmond to fit-out builders in SoMa, Mission Bay and the Financial District.
Behind on the Books for a San Francisco Job?
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San Francisco Business Registration and Gross Receipts Tax: The City and County of San Francisco requires businesses operating in the city to register with the Office of the Treasurer and Tax Collector and to file a gross receipts tax return, with construction treated as its own activity category and liability driven by receipts attributable to work performed in the city. Estimated payments fall due during the year, not only at filing. The bookkeeping consequence is simple: every job needs a jurisdiction tag when it is set up, and revenue needs to be recorded against it, because reconstructing which receipts were San Francisco receipts a year later is guesswork.
Health Care Security Ordinance and Paid Sick Leave: The San Francisco Health Care Security Ordinance requires covered employers to make a health care expenditure for each hour payable to employees performing work in San Francisco, at an expenditure rate the city updates annually, and to submit an annual reporting form to the Office of Labor Standards Enforcement. The San Francisco Paid Sick Leave Ordinance accrues on hours worked in the city as well. For a crew that moves between a city job and a peninsula job in the same week, that is a timesheet design problem before it is a compliance problem, and it has to be solved at payroll entry.
CDTFA Sales and Use Tax on Materials Versus Fixtures: California treats a construction contractor as the consumer of materials it furnishes and installs, so tax is generally paid on purchase, while for fixtures the contractor is generally treated as the retailer and tax applies to the fixture price. The California Department of Tax and Fee Administration also layers district taxes that vary by where property is delivered or used. Both distinctions are made hundreds of times a month by whoever enters the bill, which is why they belong in a bookkeeping process rather than in a year-end conversation.
DIR Prevailing Wage and Certified Payroll: Most California public works require contractor and subcontractor registration with the Department of Industrial Relations, payment of the prevailing wage determination for the craft and county, and electronic submission of certified payroll records. City-funded San Francisco construction adds local hiring and enforcement obligations administered through the Office of Labor Standards Enforcement. Treated as paperwork, this becomes a weekly scramble. Treated as bookkeeping, it is a by-product: the same payroll run that costs labor to the job produces the certified payroll, so the two always agree.
Union Trust Fund Remittance and Fund Audits: Bay Area trades are heavily unionized, and fringe benefits are remitted monthly to several separate trusts per craft, each with its own report format, rate per hour and deadline. Trust funds audit. The record that matters in an audit is whether the hours reported to the fund match the hours in the payroll register and the hours costed to the job. We prepare the remittances from the payroll data itself so those three numbers are one number, and fringes sit on the project rather than in a general payroll account.
Worker Classification, W-9s and Insurance Certificates: California applies a strict test to whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor, and misclassification is expensive. Alongside that, paying a subcontractor without a current certificate of insurance or a signed W-9 on file is a control failure that surfaces at 1099 time or after a claim. We collect the documents before the first payment, hold bills that are missing them, and track subcontractor payments by vendor all year so 1099-NEC filing is a report rather than a reconstruction.
Preliminary Notice and Retainage Records: California lien and stop payment notice rights depend on preliminary notice served within a short window of first furnishing labor or materials, and on being able to show what was billed, what was paid and what is being held. We are not attorneys and we do not serve notices. What we maintain is the underlying record: first furnishing date, contract and change order amounts, billings, payments received and retainage held by job and by tier, so the dates run off real data and your attorney gets the backup the same day it is asked for.
A fair question when you already have a bookkeeper, or a cousin who does the invoices. 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 of the bookkeeping burden on a San Francisco contractor is re-typing something that already exists somewhere else. Connecting the field system to the accounting file removes entire categories of entry, and what is left gets done properly.
A QuickBooks file set up for a business that sells products cannot hold a construction company. Jobs end up as customers with no cost structure underneath, retainage hides in receivables, payroll posts to one wage account, and every report you run is company-wide when you needed it by job.
Not sure how bad the file is? Find out first.
If commitments, change orders and time are already being captured in the field, the office should not be entering them a second time. Double entry is where the two sets of numbers start to disagree, and reconciling them later costs more than connecting them once.
One set of numbers, entered once, that the field and the office both believe.
Clean books are not the deliverable. These are the deliverable, and they arrive on the same date every month whether or not you chase them:
See what a rebuilt set of books looks like in our construction bookkeeping case studies. When you want WIP and bonding-ready statements built on top of them, that is construction accounting for San Francisco contractors.
Yes, catch-up work is how most San Francisco contractors start with us. We take the last month that actually reconciles, then rebuild forward: bank, credit card and line of credit accounts reconciled, uncoded card and 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 the hours were worked on. Most contractors who are three to nine months behind are current within two to four weeks, and your CPA gets a file they can file from rather than a file they have to argue with.
The City and County of San Francisco administers a gross receipts tax and an annual business registration through the Office of the Treasurer and Tax Collector, and construction is one of the activity categories with its own rate schedule and its own apportionment rules. Because liability is driven by receipts attributable to work done in the city, revenue has to be tagged by project location as invoices are entered, not reconstructed at filing time from memory. We tag every job with its jurisdiction in the file, so the annual return and the estimated payments during the year both come off real records.
The Health Care Security Ordinance requires covered employers to make a health care expenditure for each hour payable to employees who work inside San Francisco, at a rate the city sets each year, and to file an annual reporting form with the Office of Labor Standards Enforcement. The San Francisco Paid Sick Leave Ordinance is accrued on hours worked in the city as well. That makes it a payroll processing job, not a year-end one: if a crew works Tuesday in the Mission and Wednesday in San Mateo County, the timesheet has to record where. We set up payroll so the city hours are captured at entry and reconcile to the job cost labor.
That is the most common file we inherit. Typically every job is a customer with no sub-customer structure, cost codes do not exist, materials and subcontractor costs sit in one lump expense account, retainage is invisible inside accounts receivable, undeposited funds has months of stale entries, and payroll posts to a single wage account so no labor lands on a job. We rebuild the chart of accounts for a contractor, add items and cost codes that match the work you actually take, correct the historical coding as far back as is useful, and set bank feed rules so the file stays right after we hand it back.
California treats a construction contractor as the consumer of the materials it furnishes and installs, so tax is generally paid at purchase, while for fixtures the contractor is generally treated as the retailer and tax applies to the fixture price. The California Department of Tax and Fee Administration also applies district taxes that vary by the location where property is delivered or used, so a purchase going to a San Francisco job can carry a different rate than the same purchase going to your yard. Both of those are decisions made at the moment a bill is entered. We code them then, with the job and delivery point recorded, rather than sorting it out under audit.
Yes. Union density is high in San Francisco, and a single crew can generate monthly remittances to several separate trust funds covering health and welfare, pension, annuity, vacation and training, each with its own form, its own rate per hour and its own due date. It is a grind of repeated data entry and it is where errors accumulate quietly until a fund audit finds them. We prepare the remittance reports from the same payroll register that feeds job cost, so hours reported to the funds and hours costed to the jobs are the same hours, and fringes land on the project instead of in a general overhead account.
Generally yes. Most California public works require contractors and subcontractors to register with the Department of Industrial Relations, pay the prevailing wage determination for the craft and county, and submit certified payroll records electronically to the DIR. San Francisco adds its own layer on city-funded construction, including local hiring requirements and enforcement through the Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, which usually means submitting payroll into the city compliance system as well. This is a weekly bookkeeping rhythm rather than a filing event, and the filed payroll and the job cost labor have to agree. We produce both from one payroll run.
Building on a constrained city site costs money that does not exist in a suburban job. Street use and traffic control permits, sidewalk protection, crane and hoist time, night and weekend differentials, offsite material staging, parking for crews, and haul-off on a lot with no laydown area all get charged to the company and then quietly coded to general expense, which makes every future bid understate the real cost of city work. We create logistics cost codes on urban jobs and code those charges to the project as they arrive, so the burden of building in San Francisco shows up in job profitability where you can bid against it.
Bookkeeping is the day-to-day production work: coding every transaction to a job and cost code, entering AP and subcontractor bills, recording draws and retainage, processing payroll and fringes, reconciling every account, and closing the month on a fixed date. Accounting is the layer built on top of those books, including WIP schedules, percentage of completion revenue, over and underbilling analysis, bonding-ready statements and tax planning. Most San Francisco contractors who are behind need the bookkeeping first, because none of the analysis is worth anything on records nobody trusts. See construction accounting in San Francisco for the accounting side.
Start with the free Audit. Send your QuickBooks file and a recent job list, and we will tell you what is miscoded, how far behind the reconciliations are, what a catch-up would involve and how long it would take. There is 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, so a question does not start a clock. Most San Francisco contractors find it costs less than carrying an in-house bookkeeper in one of the most expensive labor markets in the country.
FinTruction handles construction bookkeeping for contractors across California. Select your city for catch-up work, job-cost coding and a monthly close in your market.
This page is the day-to-day work: coding, reconciliations, payroll entry and the monthly close. When you need WIP schedules, over and underbilling analysis, bonding-ready statements and tax planning built on those books, that is the accounting service.
Construction Accounting in San Francisco
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Working across the state? Construction accounting in California
Send us your QuickBooks file and a list of your active jobs. We will tell you which months actually reconcile, what has been coded to the wrong job, whether payroll is landing on the projects at all, and what a catch-up would take. No charge and no obligation for the Audit.
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