Catch-up, clean coding and a close that lands on the same date every month
You already know the books are behind. Six months of tideflats work and warehouse jobs out toward Frederickson went in against a vendor name instead of a job, the L&I hours were never split by risk class, and your CPA will not file until somebody codes it. Construction bookkeeping in Tacoma is mostly a data entry problem before it is anything else: hours to the right class, costs to the right job, revenue to the right B&O line, sales tax at the job site rate. We catch you up, then close every month on a fixed date so it does not happen twice.
On the ground
Port of Tacoma tideflats, Washington
Washington turns three separate rules into data entry, and all three are decided at the keyboard rather than at year end. Hours have to be classified as they are entered, revenue has to be coded to a B&O classification as it lands, and sales tax has to follow the job site. A generalist bookkeeper has no reason to know any of that, which is why the same errors show up in almost every Pierce County file we inherit.
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.
Tacoma work comes in shapes that generate very different paperwork, and most contractors here run more than one shape at a time. The tideflats and the Northwest Seaport Alliance terminals produce marine, rail, paving and remediation work with public owners attached. The I-5 corridor through Fife, Sumner, Puyallup, Frederickson and DuPont has been absorbing warehouse and distribution construction for years, which is tilt-up, site work and a long vendor list per job. Joint Base Lewis-McChord to the south feeds a steady sub tier of federal work with its own wage and record keeping rules. Healthcare buildouts for the big Tacoma hospital systems add tenant improvement work on occupied sites. And behind all of it sits a housing stock that is genuinely old, so remodel and repair crews are busy in the North End, Proctor, Hilltop and the Stadium District while multifamily goes up along the Thea Foss Waterway and at Point Ruston.
One contractor moving between those four or five worlds in a single quarter is normal here, and it is exactly what buries a bookkeeping function. A public tideflats job needs certified payroll every week. A warehouse in Sumner needs a different sales tax location code than the same builder's job in Lakewood. A remodel in the North End sits in a different L&I risk class than the crew pouring slab in Frederickson. None of those are hard decisions individually. They are hard because there are hundreds of them a month and each one has to be made at the moment of entry by someone who knows the difference.
When the entry stops keeping up, the damage is quiet. Costs pile up under vendor names, so no report can tell you which job made money. Payroll goes in as a lump, so the burden is wrong and the quarterly hours report is a reconstruction. Retainage disappears into receivables and nobody chases it. The B&O return gets estimated from the bank balance. Then the year ends and the CPA quotes a cleanup that costs more than a year of doing it properly would have. The work was profitable. The recording is what put the company at risk.
That is the whole job here. We catch the file up, put the coding decisions in front of people who make them correctly every time, and hold a fixed close date so it stays that way. If your project managers already run commitments and change orders in a platform, we connect it, and our Procore and QuickBooks integration work means the office is not retyping what the field already entered. You can also see how the same catch-up and coding work played out for other contractors in our construction bookkeeping case studies.
Most Tacoma contractors reach us the same way: the bookkeeper left, the file has not reconciled since spring, and the accountant will not touch a return until it does. We start at the last month that genuinely balanced and work forward until the file is current and trustworthy again, then hand it back structured for construction rather than for a shop that sells off a shelf.
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 →
A transaction in Washington carries three decisions, not one: which job, which cost code, and which tax treatment. Get the third one wrong on a material purchase for a Fife warehouse and nobody notices until an excise return or an audit. We make all three at entry, while the delivery ticket and the purchase order still say what the money was for.
Payroll is where a Washington construction file usually breaks, because the premium is priced by the hour in a risk class and almost no payroll setup is built that way out of the box. We process payroll so hours carry their class and their job from the timecard through to the quarterly report, and so the certified payroll you file on a public job equals the labor in your cost report.
Port terminal and JBLM subcontract work runs on progress draws with money held back for months, and a warehouse shell in Sumner can carry thirty vendors on one job. We enter the payables against the right job, prepare and record the draw or pay application, and post the retained portion where it can be seen instead of leaving it to be discovered when a deposit comes up short.
A close that lands whenever it lands is the same as no close. You get a reconciled, construction formatted statement package on the same working day each month, with job profitability, retainage positions and the receipt totals your state and City of Tacoma B&O returns are filed from. Nothing gets rebuilt at deadline.
We handle contractor bookkeeping across Pierce County and the South Sound, from marine and pile driving crews on the tideflats to remodelers working century old houses in the North End.
Behind on the Books in Tacoma?
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 |
Washington assesses industrial insurance premiums per hour worked in each risk classification, which makes hours, not wages, the number your books have to get right. The classification belongs on the timecard line, because one worker can move between classes inside a single day and a Tacoma crew often does. A portion of the premium is a worker deduction, so it also has to be withheld and posted correctly on the paycheck. Get the hours wrong and two things break at once: the quarterly report filed with Labor and Industries, and the labor burden sitting on every job in your cost report.
The Washington Business and Occupation tax is reported by classification on gross receipts, so every invoice and deposit needs its classification recorded when it is entered rather than sorted out on the day the excise return is due. The Department of Revenue assigns your filing frequency, which for most active contractors is monthly, and there is no time in a monthly cycle to reconstruct anything. Setting the classification on the job record at the point the job is created means the return is a report off the books instead of a project.
Tacoma levies its own municipal B&O tax alongside the state tax, with separate registration and its own rules for apportioning receipts to work performed inside the city. Contractors who take jobs north into Seattle pick up a second city filing on the same principle. Bookkeeping-wise this is a tagging problem: the taxing city goes on the job record, receipts roll up by city automatically, and nobody has to read through a year of invoices in January trying to remember where each project was.
Washington sources construction to the place the work is performed, so the correct combined rate depends on the job site address and not on where your office or your yard sits. The Department of Revenue publishes a location code for each taxing district, and that code drives both the rate on the invoice and the local sales tax breakdown on the excise return. Recording the site address and location code once, when the job is set up, is what stops a Fife job and a Lakewood job from being billed at the same wrong rate for six months.
Material bought without Washington sales tax and then consumed on a Tacoma job generally creates a use tax liability, and the same applies to inventory pulled from your own yard or equipment brought in from out of state. This is an accrual nobody makes unless a process makes them, because the trigger is consumption rather than purchase. We flag untaxed purchases at entry and accrue the use tax against the job that used the material, so it appears in the period it belongs to rather than as an assessment later.
Public works in Washington require a Statement of Intent to Pay Prevailing Wages filed with Labor and Industries before payment, certified payroll records covering the work, and an Affidavit of Wages Paid before final payment. Each filing carries a fee and each subcontractor files their own, so the record keeping is a schedule as much as it is a form. We keep the filed certified payroll and the job cost labor equal week by week, and track filing status by contract and by sub so a closeout is not held up by one missing affidavit.
Washington expects contractors to use registered subcontractors, and the documents that prove it are the same documents your books need anyway. Before a sub is paid we want a W-9, a current certificate of insurance, and the UBI and contractor registration number, held against the vendor record. That single habit fixes three problems: worker classification exposure between 1099 and W-2 treatment, 1099-NEC preparation in January, and an expired insurance certificate that would otherwise only be noticed after something goes wrong on site.
A fair question when you already have a bookkeeper, or had one. Here is the honest answer.
Contractors who were behind, off the bank, or heading into an audit. Same work, different trades.
$1M+ Rebuild
"FinTruction rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up, with real job costing, WIP, and retainage."
Built From Scratch
"FinTruction set the accounts up properly first, then cleaned up everything I never entered."
Good bookkeeping in this state is mostly about making the correct entry the easy entry. Most Tacoma contractors do not need new software, they need the file they already have configured so the job, the cost code, the risk class and the tax rate come along automatically instead of being remembered.
A QuickBooks file set up by someone who has never done a Washington construction return has predictable faults, and they are all coding faults. One tax rate on every job. No cost codes. Retainage inside receivables. Payroll items that cannot tell one risk class from another. We rebuild it so the right entry is the default entry.
Is your QuickBooks file the reason you are behind?
Double entry is where coding errors are born. If a foreman already picked the job and the cost code on a phone in Frederickson, the office should not be picking them again from a paper timecard three days later. We connect the field tools to the accounting so the data arrives once and arrives coded.
Entered once, in the field, already carrying the job and the class.
Once the coding holds, the reporting is a by-product rather than a second job. This is the package a Tacoma contractor gets on a fixed date:
When you need WIP schedules and bonding-ready statements on top of this, that is our Tacoma construction accounting service.
Yes, catch-up work is how most Tacoma contractors start with us. We take the last month that actually reconciled, then work forward: bank, card and line of credit accounts reconciled in order, costs recoded off the vendor name and onto the job and cost code, payroll rebuilt so hours land against the right project, revenue split back out by B&O classification, and retainage pulled out of ordinary receivables. Nine months of backlog on a five to fifteen job shop is normally current within two to four weeks, and your CPA gets a file they can file from rather than a list of questions.
Washington industrial insurance premiums are assessed per hour worked in each risk classification, not as a percentage of payroll, so hours are the source document and they have to be captured and classified every pay period. That means the timecard, not the paycheck, drives the number. A crew member who spends the morning on a tilt-up warehouse in Frederickson and the afternoon on a residential remodel in the North End can sit in two different risk classes on the same day, and those hours have to be split at entry. If they are not, both the quarterly report filed with Labor and Industries and the labor burden on your job cost report are wrong, and part of the premium is a worker deduction that also has to be withheld and recorded correctly.
Washington B&O tax is charged on gross receipts with no deduction for labor, materials or subcontractors, and it is reported by classification, so the coding decision belongs at the moment the invoice or deposit is entered rather than at filing time. Tacoma adds a local B&O tax administered by the City, with its own registration and its own apportionment of receipts to work performed inside city limits, and Seattle runs a separate one for anyone crossing north. In practice that means each job record carries the classification and the taxing city from the day it is set up, so the excise return and the city return are both read straight off the books.
Washington sources construction to where the work is performed, so the correct combined rate follows the job site address rather than your office or your yard. The Department of Revenue publishes a location code for each taxing district, and that code is what ties the invoice to the right rate and to the local sales tax addendum on the excise return. Bookkeeping-wise the fix is simple and it has to happen once per job, not once per invoice: capture the site address and location code when the job is created in QuickBooks so every progress billing off that job picks up the right rate automatically. Contractors who default everything to one rate are usually under-collecting in some jurisdictions and over-collecting in others at the same time.
Washington public works under RCW 39.12 require a Statement of Intent to Pay Prevailing Wages filed with Labor and Industries and approved before you are paid, certified payroll records covering the work, and an Affidavit of Wages Paid approved before final payment. Each form carries a filing fee, and each of your subcontractors has to file their own. The bookkeeping job is to keep the filed payroll and the labor sitting in job cost equal, week by week, including fringe, so nothing has to be reconciled backwards. On Port of Tacoma and city work we also keep a filing status list by contract and by sub, because one missing subcontractor affidavit is enough to stall a closeout.
Yes, and it is usually the first thing we do. The files we inherit tend to share the same faults: jobs set up as customers with no cost codes underneath, undeposited funds carrying balances from two years ago, owner draws mixed into job expense, retainage sitting inside accounts receivable, one sales tax rate applied to every job regardless of where it was, and no way to tell one B&O classification from another. We rebuild the chart of accounts around job costing, set up the items and cost codes for the work you actually take, fix the bank feed rules so the coding holds, and reconcile back through the period.
Retainage gets its own receivable at the moment the pay application is entered, not discovered later when someone notices the deposit was short. Every progress billing on a Tacoma job records the gross amount, the retained portion and the net, so the balance sheet carries what is actually held against each contract, and we mirror the same treatment on the payable side for what you hold from your own subs. On public work we also record what the closeout depends on, because retained funds on a Washington public job are released only after the awarding agency gets clearances, and a filing that is behind holds up your own cash.
Yes, and treating it as a bookkeeping control rather than paperwork is the point. Before a subcontractor is paid we want the W-9, a current certificate of insurance, the UBI and contractor registration number so we can confirm they are registered with Labor and Industries, and on prevailing wage jobs their own Intent filing. Those documents sit against the vendor record, so 1099-NEC preparation in January is a report rather than a hunt, and an expired certificate shows up before the invoice is approved instead of after a claim.
Bookkeeping is the recording layer: coding every transaction to a job and cost code, entering payroll hours by L&I risk class, reconciling banks and cards, running AP and AR, recording draws and retainage, and closing the month on a fixed date. Accounting is the reporting and decision layer built on top of it: WIP schedules, over and underbilling, percentage of completion, bonding-ready statements and tax planning. The second one is only as good as the first. Many contractors here start on bookkeeping to get current, then add our construction accounting service in Tacoma once the file can be trusted.
Start with the free Audit. Send us your QuickBooks file and your last payroll register and we will tell you how far behind you really are, what is miscoded, whether your L&I hours are classified, and what a catch-up would take. No obligation. After that it is a flat monthly fee based on transaction volume, active jobs and payroll complexity, with any catch-up quoted separately and up front so it does not turn into an open clock. Sahil Ahmad, CPA reviews the work, so a construction CPA has actually looked at your file.
FinTruction handles construction bookkeeping across Washington State. Select your city below for catch-up work, job-cost coding and a monthly close in your market.
This page is the day-to-day recording 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 engagement.
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Send us your QuickBooks file and your last payroll register. We will tell you what is miscoded, whether your L&I hours are classified, what your retainage is really worth, and what a catch-up would take. No charge and no obligation for the Audit.
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