Browser tools that do the construction specific math for you: percent complete and over or under billing, progress billing, worker classification and year-end prep. Nothing to download, and the answer is on screen as you type. Built by a construction accounting firm that runs these numbers with real contractors every month.
Every tool is free, runs in your browser, and shows its working. Nothing is emailed to you and no calculation is gated.
Why a calculator beats a spreadsheet for these questionsPercent complete, and whether you are overbilled or underbilled on a job, by the cost to cost method.
Ten results from four numbers Open the tool →A progress billing application and continuation sheet, in the format general contractors expect.
Prints or saves as a PDF Open the tool →A scored read on whether a worker is really an independent contractor, from how you actually use them.
Scored against the IRS factors Open the tool →Everything your accountant will ask for at year end, in the order it makes sense to gather it.
Keeps your progress as you go Open the tool →Find the sentence closest to what you are actually trying to work out.
Am I overbilled or underbilled on this job, and by how much?
WIP Calculator →What percent complete is this job, and how much profit have I actually earned so far?
WIP Calculator →How do I put together this month's progress billing without rebuilding the spreadsheet?
Pay Application Generator →How much is being held back as retainage, and what is actually due this month?
Pay Application Generator →Is this worker really a 1099, or am I going to get caught?
1099 vs W-2 Test →What does my accountant need from me before year end?
Year-End Tax Checklist →I need the underlying schedule as a spreadsheet I can send to my bank.
Construction Templates →Almost every business calculator on the internet assumes the same thing: you sell something, you collect the money, and the profit lands in the same month. Construction breaks that assumption on day one. Your jobs run across months and sometimes years. Costs land when they happen and revenue lands when you invoice, so the two never line up inside a period. Your customer holds back five or ten percent of every invoice as retainage. Change orders get performed before anybody signs them. That is why a generic gross profit calculator will give a contractor a confident, wrong answer, and why every tool on this page is built around percentage of completion instead.
The other reason these exist is what the alternatives look like. Search for any of these calculations and you get one of three things: software you have to buy, a widget that hides its result behind an email form, or a static PDF that leaves you to do the arithmetic anyway. None of those is much help at nine at night when you are trying to work out whether you can afford payroll on Friday. Ours return the number immediately, show the formula they used, and read the answer back to you in plain English so you know what to do about it.
Percent complete measured cost to cost, not by how the job feels. Earned revenue capped at the contract value, because a job cannot earn more than it is worth. Over and under billings kept as two separate balances rather than netted into one figure, which is how they sit on a real balance sheet and how a surety expects to read them. Retainage tracked on its own instead of buried inside receivables. Labor burden treated as part of cost. These are not cosmetic differences. They are the difference between a report your bank accepts and one that gets handed back.
General contractors, specialty subcontractors, remodelers and home builders, from the two-crew shop to companies running twenty jobs at once. They work whether you keep your books in QuickBooks, Sage, Foundation or a shoebox, because none of them touch your accounting system. If you already run Procore, Buildertrend or ServiceTitan, these fill the gap those platforms leave: they manage the project, and the reporting your bank and your surety want lives on the accounting side.
Every calculator on this page will do perfect arithmetic on the numbers you give it, and that is exactly the limit. If costs are coded to the wrong job, if committed costs are missing from your estimate at completion, or if retainage is sitting inside your receivables balance, the output will be wrong and it will look completely reasonable. That is the failure we are called in to fix more than any other. If a result here surprises you, the honest next step is usually not a better spreadsheet but a look at the underlying job data, which is what our free 48 hour audit is for.
Three passes, roughly an hour in total, and you close the month knowing where every job stands.
Around the 25th, build each progress billing in the pay application generator straight off your schedule of values. Getting the continuation sheet right the first time is what stops a rejection two weeks later, when the money you were counting on does not arrive.
Once costs are in for the month, run each open job through the WIP calculator. You are looking for two things: a percent complete that matches what the site says, and a billing position that is not drifting further ahead of the work every month.
Move the month's figures into the WIP schedule on our construction templates page. That sheet is what your bank, your surety and your CPA will ask for, and it is far easier to keep monthly than to reconstruct in March.
Yes. You do not create an account and you do not pay for anything, and on every calculator the answer is on screen from the moment you land. The one place we ask for anything is printing the finished document from the pay application generator, which asks for your name, email and number once per browser. Everything else, including all the arithmetic on that page, stays open. We build them because contractors who use them tend to find the same thing: the arithmetic was never the problem, the data going into it was.
A tool runs in your browser and gives you the answer. A template is a file you download and fill in yourself. Use a tool when you want a number now, on one job. Use a template when you need something you can email to a bank or a bonding agent, or when you want the whole schedule across every job in one sheet.
They are built to work together. The WIP calculator will tell you where one job stands in about thirty seconds; the WIP schedule template on our construction templates page is where you keep all of them, month after month.
Yes. Nothing here connects to your software, so it does not matter what you run. Those platforms manage the project. The reporting your bank and your surety want lives on the accounting side, which is the gap these fill. If the numbers you are pulling out of your project software do not agree with QuickBooks, that is a sync problem rather than a calculation problem, and our Procore, Buildertrend and ServiceTitan pages cover it.
For the arithmetic, no. These do the calculation correctly and explain what the answer means. What they cannot do is tell you whether the figures you typed in are right, and that is where almost every problem we see actually lives: costs coded to the wrong job, committed costs missing from the estimate, retainage buried inside receivables. A calculator will happily do perfect math on bad inputs.
Yes. The next ones on the list are a 13-week cash flow forecast, a labor burden calculator, and a change order impact tool. They get built in the order contractors ask for them, so if there is something you keep doing by hand, tell us and it moves up.
Real results from contractors we have helped untangle their books and systems.
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.
These will do the math perfectly on whatever you type in. If the job costs behind it are wrong, the answer is wrong. We will look at your actual numbers and show you what is broken, free, within 48 hours.
