Association draws, unit-price quantities, and a close that lands on a fixed date
Repairing a St. Petersburg condominium is not the bookkeeping job that building one is. The customer is an association, the money is a reserve balance or an assessment still being collected from owners, and the scope is priced on estimated quantities that move the moment the concrete is opened up. Bill it like a lump-sum contract and the file cannot say which building consumed what, or which quantities the engineer actually authorized. We set the job up the way the money arrives and the way the work is measured, by building, by scope and by approved quantity, and we code it that way every week.
On the ground
Downtown St. Petersburg from the marina, Florida
A single association job can carry four buildings, a schedule of unit prices, quantities that change weekly, shared access costs that belong to all of it, a board that approves draws once a month, and owners who will read your invoice. Run that through a file built for lump-sum residential work and by month three nobody can say what anything cost.
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.
St. Petersburg has an unusual building stock for a Florida boom town. Downtown and the waterfront are visibly new, but behind the new towers sits a very large inventory of mid-rise condominium and cooperative buildings put up decades ago, right on salt water, and those buildings are now the ones generating the work. That is a different customer from a developer. It is a board, a management company, an engineer of record and several hundred owners who each receive a share of the bill.
The legal framework around those buildings has been rewritten since 2021 and it now sets the calendar. Milestone inspections under Section 553.899 apply to condominium and cooperative buildings of three habitable stories or more on a thirty year schedule, with a local enforcement agency able to require twenty five years where salt water proximity warrants it, and repairs identified by a phase two report must be commenced within 365 days of the agency receiving it. Structural integrity reserve studies under Section 718.112 then determine what the association has to hold against those components. The work is not discretionary and it is not indefinitely deferrable.
For a contractor, the consequence is a customer whose payment behavior is legible in advance if you bother to read it. An association funding to a completed study is buying out of reserves. One that received its first study and its repair scope in the same year is heading for a special assessment, collected from owners over months, and House Bill 913, effective July 1, 2025, gave boards further routes including pooled reserve funding and, with owner approval, a pause of reserve contributions for up to two budget years to pay for repairs the milestone inspection identified. Where the money comes from is the single best predictor of when your draw clears.
Underneath all of that, restoration work is measured work. Quantities move, engineers authorize, shared access costs serve every building at once, and owners read the invoices. It is a bookkeeping problem long before it becomes an accounting one, which is why the function fails first here. You can see how we have handled it for other contractors in our construction bookkeeping case studies.
An association pays out of a reserve balance or an assessment it is still collecting, and it releases money on a board cycle. We prepare the draw so it can be adopted at a meeting without a round of questions, then age the receivable against what was actually approved rather than what was submitted. That is the difference between knowing you are owed money and knowing when it arrives.
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 →
Restoration scopes are bid on estimated quantities and settled on measured ones. Square feet of spall repair, linear feet of railing, tendon counts and stucco areas all move once the surfaces are opened. If the file holds only a contract value and a percentage, the overrun surfaces during an argument. We keep the unit price schedule in the file and post authorized quantities against it as the work is measured.
Owners paying an assessment want to know what their building cost, and a phase two scope almost never lands evenly across a community. Shared costs are the part that gets fudged: swing stage, hoisting, containment, water intrusion protection and site setup serve everything, so they need an allocation basis chosen on purpose rather than by whichever building started first.
Closing out a Florida job means swearing to what you owe. The final payment affidavit under Section 713.06 states whether every lienor under your direct contract has been paid, or names those who have not and the amount. It is produced straight out of accounts payable, so a job with untidy subcontractor and supplier balances cannot be closed on time no matter how good the field work was.
Most contractors reach us behind rather than broken. We start at the last month that genuinely reconciled and rebuild forward: accounts reconciled month by month, spend recoded to the right building and cost code, retainage lifted out of receivables, duplicates cleared. Then the month closes on a date you can plan around instead of whenever the file is finally quiet.
We handle bookkeeping for contractors across St. Petersburg and Pinellas County, from concrete restoration crews on the waterfront towers to the trades that follow them through the building.
Running Association Work in St. Petersburg?
Get Your Free AuditA 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 |
A milestone inspection is required for buildings three habitable stories or more that are subject in whole or in part to the condominium or cooperative form of ownership, on a schedule tied to the building reaching thirty years of age and every ten years after that. A local enforcement agency may require inspection at twenty five years where environmental conditions such as proximity to salt water warrant it. Phase one is a visual examination. Phase two follows only where substantial structural deterioration is identified, and repairs recommended by a phase two report must be commenced within 365 days after the local enforcement agency receives the report. That is a dated obligation on your customer, and it is why this work books out so far ahead.
A residential condominium association must complete a structural integrity reserve study at least every ten years for each building of three or more habitable stories, covering named structural components and setting the reserve position for them. This is not your compliance obligation, it is your customer's, but it determines whether the repair is funded from reserves already held or from an assessment still to be collected. Reading that before you sign a contract is the cheapest cash flow work available to a St. Petersburg contractor.
The 2025 legislation raised the deferred maintenance item threshold that brings a component into the reserve study from 10,000 dollars to 25,000 dollars, indexed for inflation, with the Department setting the 2026 figure at 25,675 dollars. It permits pooled reserve funding alongside the component by component approach, and it allows a board that has completed a milestone inspection to pause reserve contributions for up to two consecutive budget years, with owner approval, so those funds go to the identified repairs. Each of those routes has a different payment rhythm, and the rhythm belongs in your receivable file.
Contracts for work to be performed and bids for work to be performed are official records of the association, with bids maintained for at least one year after receipt and accounting records for at least seven years, and official records are open to inspection by members at reasonable times. Your invoices, schedules of value and change documentation therefore end up in front of unit owners who are personally paying for the work. Billing that reads clearly to a non-contractor is a commercial advantage here in a way it is not on a private job.
No lien is valid against the condominium property as a whole except with the unanimous consent of the unit owners. Labor or materials furnished to the common elements with the association's authorization may be the basis for a lien against all condominium parcels in the proportions for which the owners are liable for common expenses, and work furnished to an individual unit cannot support a lien against a unit whose owner did not consent to or request it. We are not attorneys and we do not file or serve anything. What we do is keep contract, authorization, billing and payment records by job in a state where your attorney is not reconstructing them.
A contractor furnishes the owner a final payment affidavit stating whether all lienors under the direct contract who served notice have been paid in full, or naming each who has not and the amount due, and it must be furnished before final payment and at least five days before instituting an action to enforce a lien. This is a sworn statement drawn straight from your accounts payable by job. Where those balances are untidy the job simply cannot be closed, and the retainage sits there while the file is untangled.
A fair question if you already have a bookkeeper, a spouse doing the entry, or a national franchise doing it cheaply. Here is the honest answer.
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 St. Petersburg contractors do not need another system. They need the one they have configured for measured work, so a quantity is captured where it is measured and a cost carries a building and a scope from the moment it happens.
The files we inherit were usually set up by someone who sells products. Every association is one customer, the buildings underneath it do not exist, unit prices are nowhere, retainage hides inside receivables, and a swing stage invoice lands in equipment expense where no job will ever see it.
Is your QuickBooks file telling you anything useful?
The largest source of billing error on measured work is a quantity that was written on a ticket, agreed on a walk, and then typed into the office system two weeks later by somebody who was not there. Capturing quantity, location and authorization at the point of measurement makes the draw a printout rather than a reconstruction.
One building, one scope, one quantity, carried through to the close.
Clean books only matter if you read something off them. This is the package a St. Petersburg contractor gets on a fixed date once the coding is under control:
If you want WIP, over and underbilling and bonding-ready statements on top of this, that is our St. Petersburg construction accounting service.
Because the association is not spending its own money in the way a developer does. It is spending a reserve balance, or an assessment it is still collecting from unit owners, and both are approved and released on a board cycle rather than on your schedule. That has three bookkeeping consequences. Your draw has to arrive in a form the board can adopt at a meeting, your job cost has to be readable by people who are not in construction, and your accounts receivable aging has to reflect a payer whose cash arrives in installments. We build the job around all three rather than treating it as an ordinary progress billing.
Section 553.899 of the Florida Statutes requires a milestone inspection for buildings three habitable stories or more that are under the condominium or cooperative form of ownership, on a schedule tied to the building reaching thirty years of age, and every ten years after that. A local enforcement agency may require it at twenty five years where conditions such as proximity to salt water warrant it. Phase one is a visual examination. Phase two follows only where substantial structural deterioration is found, and repairs identified in a phase two report must be commenced within 365 days after the local enforcement agency receives it. That deadline is why the work is dated, sequenced and unavoidable.
It is the study required under Section 718.112 of the Florida Statutes for each building of three or more habitable stories, repeated at least every ten years, covering named structural components and setting what the association has to reserve for them. It matters to a contractor because it tells you where the money is. An association funding to a completed study has cash for the work. One that has just received its first study and a repair scope at the same time is going to a special assessment, and a special assessment is collected over time. Reading the funding position before you sign is a cash flow decision, not an accounting one.
It changed several things that touch your cash. House Bill 913 took effect on July 1, 2025. It raised the deferred maintenance item threshold that pulls a component into the study from 10,000 dollars to 25,000 dollars, indexed for inflation, and the Department set the 2026 figure at 25,675 dollars. It permits pooled reserve funding alongside the component by component method. It also allows a board that has completed a milestone inspection to pause reserve contributions for up to two consecutive budget years, with owner approval, so the money goes into the repairs the inspection identified. We do not advise associations. We do read the funding route into your receivable, because it predicts payment timing.
By quantity, not by percentage. Concrete restoration is bid on estimated quantities of spall repair, post-tension and railing work that nobody can know until the surfaces are opened up, so the contract value moves as the field measures. If the file only holds a contract amount and a percentage complete, the overrun is invisible until somebody argues about it. We record the schedule of unit prices, post actual field quantities against each one as they are authorized, and keep the engineer signed field tickets attached to the entry, so the billing and the backup are one record.
As several jobs under one contract, with shared costs allocated deliberately. An association with four buildings will want to know what each building cost, because its owners will ask, and because a phase two scope rarely lands evenly. We open a cost center per building and per scope, code direct work straight to it, and allocate the genuinely shared items such as swing stage, hoisting, containment and site setup on a stated basis rather than dumping them into the first building started. That way an assessment can be explained without rebuilding the history from delivery tickets.
Largely, yes, and you should assume it. Section 718.111 of the Florida Statutes makes contracts for work to be performed and bids for work to be performed part of the official records of the association, with bids maintained for at least one year after receipt and accounting records for at least seven years, and those official records are open to inspection by members at reasonable times. In practice that means your invoices and change documentation become documents unit owners read. Billing that is coherent to an owner who is paying a 30,000 dollar assessment is a commercial asset, not paperwork.
In its own receivable, entered on the day you bill, with the release condition recorded next to it. The failure we see repeatedly is retainage left inside ordinary accounts receivable, where it ages beside thirty day invoices and nobody separates the two. On a restoration job that is expensive, because the balance is large, held long, and often released only after a final walk with the engineer of record. We book retainage receivable and retainage payable separately by contract, with an aging, so you can see what is genuinely owed and what is simply not due yet.
Under Section 713.06 of the Florida Statutes a contractor furnishes the owner a final payment affidavit stating whether all lienors under the direct contract who served notice have been paid in full, or naming those who have not and the amounts due, and it has to be furnished before final payment and at least five days before instituting an action. It is a sworn document produced directly from your accounts payable. If your subcontractor and supplier balances by job are not clean, you cannot swear to it and you cannot close the job. We keep AP by job in a state where that affidavit is a report rather than an investigation.
We work with contractors across St. Petersburg and Pinellas County, including downtown and the Old Northeast, Snell Isle, Shore Acres, Kenwood, Gulfport, Treasure Island, St. Pete Beach, Madeira Beach, Seminole, Pinellas Park, Largo and Clearwater. Everything is remote, so you are not paying toward an office. Start with the free Audit: send us your file, your last bank statement and one association contract with its schedule of values, and we will tell you how far behind the books are, what is coded wrong, and what the monthly fee would be. Sahil Ahmad, CPA reviews the work.
FinTruction handles construction bookkeeping across Florida. Choose your city for catch-up work, QuickBooks cleanup, job-cost coding, draw billing and a monthly close in your market.
Bookkeeping is the coding, the draw entry, the reconciliations and the close. When you need WIP schedules, over and underbilling analysis, statements a surety or bank will lend against and tax planning on top of it, that is the accounting side of the practice.
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Send us your file, your last bank statement and one association contract with its schedule of values. We will tell you how many months are genuinely unreconciled, what is coded to the wrong building, whether your accounts payable could support a final payment affidavit today, and what the monthly fee would be. The Audit is free and there is no obligation.
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