#construction
Accounting practices for construction businesses including job costing, WIP schedules, and retainage
How independent residential GCs and custom home builders should structure their books — Section 460 method election, phase-level job cost categories, deposit and retainage handling, mechanics lien waiver discipline, warranty reserves, and the NAHB KPIs that matter.
How residential and commercial solar EPCs should structure ASC 606 performance obligations, document the Section 48E domestic content and energy community adders, reserve for workmanship warranty per kilowatt, and survive the post-Section 25D residential market in 2026.
How custom cabinet and architectural millwork shops should account for long-lead contracts under ASC 606, allocate CNC machine-hour burden, hold customer deposits as liabilities, reserve for hardwood yield loss, and expense equipment under the 2026 Section 179 limit of $2.56M.
A working guide to bookkeeping for storm-restoration roofers — splitting insurance and retail revenue, tracking ACV and recoverable-depreciation receivables, modeling mortgage-endorsement float, booking supplements as scope adjustments rather than new sales, accruing 1–3 percent workmanship warranty reserves, and applying Section 179 to trucks, dumpsters, and tear-off equipment.
How AIA Forms G702 and G703 work together, how to build a defensible schedule of values, handle retainage and change orders on the continuation sheet, and reconcile progress billings to ASC 606 revenue recognition for U.S. general contractors.
Markup and margin share a numerator but not a denominator, and the gap can quietly cost a contractor $99,000 a year. A plain-language guide to the conversion math, a target-margin lookup table, and why retailers, contractors, and restaurants keep underpricing jobs.
A solar installer's bookkeeping playbook — customer deposits under ASC 606, REC inventory, PPA classification under ASC 842, the 50% basis reduction on the Section 48 ITC, Section 6418 transferability mechanics, and the five-year recapture clock that survives a sale of the business.
Section 45L pays builders and developers $500 to $5,000 per energy-efficient home, but the One Big Beautiful Bill Act ends the credit for homes acquired after June 30, 2026. A practical guide to ENERGY STAR versus Zero Energy Ready certification, prevailing wage rules on multifamily, the LIHTC basis carve-out, and the Form 8908 mechanics that decide whether the credit survives audit.
A construction WIP schedule recognizes revenue as work is performed using cost-to-cost percentage-of-completion, then exposes over- and under-billing on every job — the report banks and surety underwriters read before the income statement.
Job costing assigns every dollar of cost to the job that caused it. Fully burdened labor runs 30 to 50 percent above base wage, overhead is applied with a predetermined rate, and committed costs reveal a budget overrun before the invoices arrive — read the variance column weekly.
Workers' compensation premium is recalculated every year using your actual payroll, and unprepared small employers routinely owe five-figure true-ups. This guide walks through the NCCI premium formula, the standard exception rules, the overtime carve-out math, owner and officer exclusion forms, the subcontractor COI rules that trigger the largest audit hits, and how to dispute a Final Audit Statement.
How construction contractors use the work-in-progress schedule and ASC 606 percentage-of-completion accounting to surface overbillings, underbillings, profit fade, and the financial signals sureties and banks actually read.
