Catch-up, clean job coding, and a monthly close that actually lands
Six months of unreconciled bank feeds, a QuickBooks file where every material run lands in one Job Materials account, and a CPA who will not file until somebody fixes it. That is how most Tucson contractors reach us, and Arizona makes the hole deeper. A Catalina Foothills bath remodel is MRRA work where you owe tax on the materials you bought. A new build in Vail is prime contracting, taxed on gross receipts. That call is made at the invoice and at the purchase order, hundreds of times a month. Our construction bookkeeping in Tucson catches you up, recodes the backlog to real jobs, and closes on a fixed date.
On the ground
Sonoran Desert outside Tucson, Arizona
Most Tucson contractors arrive behind rather than curious. We start from your last reconciled month and work forward: bank and card history pulled in, the job list rebuilt, the backlog recoded to real jobs and cost codes, TPT trued up by classification and jurisdiction, and every account reconciled. You finish with a file your CPA can file from and a starting point that will not drift again.
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 →
You cannot tell which Tucson job made money if the supply house run, the equipment rental and the framing sub all sit in one account. We enter and code transactions as they arrive so job cost is a live number rather than a year-end reconstruction, and so the roofing job in Marana and the tenant fit-out midtown can be compared honestly.
Arizona is the state where the tax decision sits inside the bookkeeping, not the tax return. Prime contracting work is taxed on gross receipts after the standard 35 percent deduction. MRRA work is not taxed under prime contracting at all, and instead carries the retail equivalent on the materials. We flag the classification when the job is opened so every entry after that inherits the correct treatment.
Paying subs and collecting draws is where documentation quietly goes missing. We run payables against the job, hold payment until the W-9, certificate of insurance and Arizona Form 5005 are on file, enter pay applications with retainage posted separately, and keep an aging you can act on rather than one you read after the fact.
Tucson crews start before sunrise for half the year, and a summer week full of split shifts and heat-driven overtime is a payroll problem before it is a scheduling one. We process payroll, allocate hours to job, phase and classification, and keep the certified payroll record and the job cost labor equal on federally funded work.
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.
A general bookkeeper can reconcile a bank account. What they cannot do is decide whether a Tucson invoice is prime contracting or MRRA, post retainage as its own receivable at entry, or keep certified payroll hours equal to the labor sitting in job cost. Those decisions are made hundreds of times a month at the transaction level, which is precisely where a construction bookkeeping service earns its keep.
Tucson runs on a mix of work that no single coding habit survives. The University of Arizona and the healthcare systems around Banner University Medical Center and Tucson Medical Center keep institutional and fit-out work moving. Aerospace and defense employers and their supplier base generate industrial and secure facility work. Suburban growth pushes out through Marana, Vail and Sahuarita. And a large retiree population in the Catalina Foothills, Oro Valley and Green Valley feeds a steady, high-volume residential remodel market that most Tucson contractors run alongside everything else.
That combination is exactly what breaks a contractor bookkeeping process. The remodel work is almost all MRRA, taxed on materials. The new construction and larger modification work is prime contracting, taxed on receipts. A crew can be on both in the same week, buying from the same supply house on the same account, and the person coding the card feed has no way to tell which is which unless somebody set the jobs up properly in the first place.
The climate compounds it. From May to September crews start before dawn and lose afternoons, monsoon storms take days out of the schedule between July and September, and the winter months from October onward are when the seasonal residents are here and remodel demand peaks. Owners are hardest pressed in the field precisely when the transaction volume is highest, so the coding slips, then the reconciliations slip, then a quarter has gone by.
The damage is rarely dramatic. It is a TPT return filed off a guess, a remodel that quietly paid tax twice, a subcontractor paid without a W-9, and an owner who cannot say which of eleven active jobs is carrying the company. Getting current is the fix, and it is a smaller job than most people fear. See how that has gone for other contractors in our construction accounting case studies.
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 for crews across Tucson and Pima County, from foothills remodelers and custom home builders to the mechanical and roofing trades that carry the Sonoran Desert climate load.
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Prime Contracting TPT and the 35 Percent Standard Deduction: Arizona does not tax contractor materials at the register the way most states do. Under the prime contracting classification of the transaction privilege tax, the tax falls on the contractor gross receipts from the project, and a standard 35 percent deduction is applied, leaving 65 percent of the qualifying contract as the taxable base. Because the tax follows the receipts rather than the purchases, the accuracy of the number depends entirely on how the billing was recorded during the month. We record contract receipts by job and jurisdiction so the Arizona Department of Revenue return is assembled from the books instead of estimated against them.
MRRA Work and Tax Paid on Materials: Maintenance, repair, replacement and alteration work is treated as its own category in Arizona and is not subject to prime contracting transaction privilege tax. Instead the contractor owes the retail equivalent on the materials incorporated into the job, either paid at the point of purchase or, for a contractor holding a TPT license, purchased exempt and reported under business code 315 for the jurisdiction where the project sits at the time the materials are used. Getting the prime contracting versus MRRA call wrong is the most expensive recurring coding error in this state, and it is made at the invoice and the purchase order.
Arizona Form 5005 and Subcontractor Files: Arizona Form 5005 is the contractor certificate a prime contractor issues to its subcontractors, documenting that the prime has assumed the prime contracting transaction privilege tax liability or the amount equal to retail tax on MRRA materials. For a subcontractor it is the evidence that the tax is not theirs to pay, and it can be issued per project or as a blanket certificate. We treat it as a document control alongside the W-9 and the certificate of insurance, collected when a vendor or job is opened rather than chased later.
Arizona Registrar of Contractors Licensing and Bond Costs: The Arizona Registrar of Contractors licenses contractors by classification, requires a license bond sized to the classification and volume, and expects licensees to keep accurate financial records through the renewal cycle. License fees, bond premiums, general liability and workers compensation are all real costs of being allowed to do the work. Coded inconsistently they distort every burden rate and every bid built on it, so we post them to overhead the same way every month and keep the statements current enough to hand over if a complaint is filed.
Davis-Bacon Certified Payroll on Federally Funded Work: Arizona has no state prevailing wage law for public construction, so a City of Tucson or Pima County project generally carries no certified payroll requirement. Federal funding is the exception. Work at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and other federally funded projects falls under the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires prevailing wages by classification and a weekly certified payroll submission on Form WH-347. The bookkeeping obligation is weekly, not annual, and the hours you certify have to equal the labor hours sitting in job cost.
Preliminary 20-Day Notice and Payment Records: Arizona lien law requires a preliminary 20-day notice to preserve lien rights on most projects, with recording deadlines after that. We are not attorneys and we do not serve notices. What we do is keep contract amounts, billings, payments received, retainage held and outstanding balances organized by job and by date furnished, so the notice calendar runs off real data and your attorney is handed backup rather than a request for it.
Worker Classification and 1099-NEC: Deciding whether a helper is a subcontractor or an employee is a bookkeeping control long before it is a tax question, because it is settled by how the payment is set up and what documentation was collected. Anyone paid at or above the IRS reporting threshold in a year needs a 1099-NEC, which is only accurate if the W-9 was captured up front and every payment was recorded against the right vendor. We track it through the year so January is a print run rather than a reconstruction.
A fair question when a local bookkeeper costs less per hour and a national franchise advertises harder. 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."
Almost no Tucson contractor needs new software. They need the file they already have configured for construction and connected to the field, so the coding happens once and the month closes without an argument about whose number is right.
The QuickBooks Online files we inherit in Tucson were set up for a business that sells things. Jobs are customers, there are no cost code items, retainage hides inside receivables, and there is nothing in the file that knows a remodel is taxed differently from a new build. We rebuild it so the structure carries the rules instead of relying on somebody remembering them.
Is your QuickBooks file the reason you cannot answer simple questions?
If your project managers already log budgets, purchase orders and change orders in a construction platform, the office should not be typing the same numbers a second time. Double entry is where the two sets of numbers start disagreeing, and it is also where a month of coding backlog comes from.
One set of numbers, entered once, that the field and the office both recognize.
A close is only useful if it lands on a date you can plan around. These are the deliverables a Tucson contractor gets from us, on the same day each month, with every account already reconciled:
When you want WIP, backlog and a bonding package on top of this, that is our construction accounting service for Tucson contractors.
Arizona splits contracting into two different tax worlds and the split is made in your books. New construction and other modification work falls under the prime contracting classification of the transaction privilege tax, where the tax is calculated on your gross receipts from the job after a standard 35 percent deduction, so 65 percent of the contract is the taxable base. Maintenance, repair, replacement and alteration work, known as MRRA, is not taxable under prime contracting at all. On MRRA you instead owe the retail equivalent on the materials you incorporate. A contractor running both kinds of job in the same week needs both treatments coded correctly at entry, not sorted out at filing time.
They are recorded differently on purpose. On an MRRA job, such as a Catalina Foothills bathroom remodel or a roof replacement in Oro Valley, the materials carry the retail equivalent of transaction privilege tax. You either pay it at the supply house at the time of purchase or, if you hold a TPT license, buy exempt and report the material cost under business code 315 for the jurisdiction the project sits in when the materials are used. On a modification job the materials go into the job cost and the tax is calculated on the contract receipts instead. We set the vendor and item defaults so the right treatment follows the job type automatically.
Yes, catch-up is one of the two reasons contractors call us, and the other one is a file nobody trusts. We start from your last reconciled month, pull the bank and card history forward, rebuild the job list, and recode the backlog so material runs, subcontractor bills and equipment rental land on the job and cost code they belong to rather than a single expense account. TPT gets trued up by jurisdiction and classification as we go, subcontractor payments get matched to vendors for 1099-NEC, and you finish with reconciled statements your CPA can file from. Most Tucson contractors who are six to twelve months behind are current in a few weeks.
That is the most common Tucson file we inherit. It usually has customers where jobs should be, one Materials account absorbing every supply house run, subcontractor payments posted straight to an expense line with no vendor record, undeposited funds sitting for months, and TPT mixed in with income. We rebuild the chart of accounts for construction, create the job and sub-customer structure, add cost code items for labor, material, equipment and subcontract, correct the historical coding, and reconcile every bank, card and line of credit account. After that, a fixed monthly process keeps it that way.
If you subcontract on Arizona projects, yes, and it belongs in your bookkeeping records rather than a folder in the truck. Arizona Form 5005 is the contractor certificate a prime contractor issues to its subcontractors. It documents that the prime has assumed the prime contracting transaction privilege tax liability, or the amount equal to retail tax on MRRA materials, so the subcontractor is not liable for it. We collect Form 5005 alongside the W-9 and the certificate of insurance when a new job or vendor is opened, and flag any job that has started without one.
Arizona has no state prevailing wage law for public construction, so a City of Tucson or Pima County job normally carries no certified payroll obligation. Federal money changes that. Work at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base or on federally funded projects falls under the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires prevailing wages by classification and a weekly certified payroll submission on Form WH-347. On the bookkeeping side we keep hours by employee, job and classification, record fringe payments, and make sure the hours you certified and the labor sitting in job cost are the same hours. Those two records disagreeing is what turns a routine audit into a finding.
We post it as its own receivable the moment the pay application is entered, not when someone notices the money never arrived. Each progress billing records the gross amount earned, the retainage withheld against a separate retainage receivable account, and the net due, all tagged to the job. Retainage you hold back from your own subcontractors goes to a matching retainage payable account. You then get an aging by job showing what is held, by whom, and against which release condition, which is also what keeps your balance sheet honest for a bank or a surety reading it.
The Arizona Registrar of Contractors licenses every contractor working in Tucson and expects licensees to demonstrate financial responsibility, carry the required license bond for their classification, and keep accurate financial records through the renewal cycle. In practice that means a balance sheet and profit and loss statement that are current and reconciled rather than reconstructed, plus job-level records if a complaint is filed. We also code license fees, bond premiums and general liability and workers compensation insurance to overhead consistently, so the burden rate you use in bids reflects what those obligations really cost.
We work with contractors across Tucson, the Catalina Foothills, Oro Valley, Marana, Dove Mountain, Vail, Sahuarita, Green Valley, Tanque Verde, Rita Ranch and the surrounding Pima County communities, and with builders working the Interstate 10 corridor between Tucson and Casa Grande. Everything we do is remote, so you get a construction bookkeeper who understands Arizona transaction privilege tax and job costing without paying toward an office. Sahil Ahmad, CPA reviews the work rather than an offshore data entry pool.
Bookkeeping is the recording layer. It is coding every transaction to the right job and cost code, running accounts payable and receivable, collecting subcontractor documents, processing payroll onto jobs, keeping the Arizona TPT records straight, reconciling every account and closing the month on a fixed date. Construction accounting is the interpretation layer built on top of it: WIP schedules, percentage of completion, over and underbilling analysis, bonding and lender packages, entity and tax strategy. Most Tucson contractors start here because they are behind, then add construction accounting once the numbers can be trusted. We provide both.
FinTruction handles contractor bookkeeping and construction accounting across Arizona. Pick your city for job-coded books, QuickBooks cleanup and TPT record-keeping in your market.
Bookkeeping is the recording. Once the file is clean, our construction accounting service adds WIP schedules, over and underbilling, tax planning and CFO support for Tucson contractors.
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Working across the state? Construction accounting in Arizona
Send us your QuickBooks file and tell us how many months are open. We will tell you what is miscoded, whether your prime contracting and MRRA work has been treated correctly, and exactly what catching up would take. The Audit is free and there is no obligation.
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