Transactions arrive on their own
Categorised, and where they belong to a job, tagged to it. Transfers between your own accounts are recognised rather than double-counted as income and expense.
Books & accounting
Books that know which job the money came from.
Bookkeeping tells you whether the business made money. Job costing tells you which work made it. Most contractors have the first and not the second — because the two live in different systems.
Bank feed categorised as it arrives
Aug 20 Home Depot #7012 Fletcher −$412.88
Aug 20 Peter — electrical Fletcher −$1,850.00
Aug 19 BR TO BR — client cheque Simcoe +$9,400.00
Aug 19 Online Banking transfer —
HST collected$10,298
Input tax credits$6,513
Net owing$3,784
Two systems that never quite agree
And you reconcile the gap on a Sunday
The problem: The jobs live in one place and the money lives in QuickBooks. When a project tool syncs, what crosses is the invoice total — not which phase the cost belonged to, or how it compares to what you priced. The books balance and still cannot answer whether the bathroom made money.
So you can tell anyone your bank balance and nobody, including yourself, which of last year’s jobs were worth doing.
- Labour is your biggest cost and the hardest to attribute across the seam
- A change order that never reaches the books never reaches the margin either
- The HST return gets rebuilt in April instead of falling out of the ledger
The same bathroom, both ways
Company P&Laccurate
This job’s marginunknown
Bathrooms vs basementsunknown
In one systemall three
What the books actually do here
No seam, so nothing gets lost crossing it.
The books are not a destination the jobs export to. They are the same ledger the jobs are already writing.
Matched to the bank line
Photographed at the counter, paired with the transaction when it posts, attached to the job. No shoebox, no month-end sorting.
Crew hours cost to the job
At their burdened rate, so your largest cost appears in job costing the way materials do. This is the piece most setups miss entirely.
The return comes out of the ledger
Collected HST and input tax credits are separated as transactions are categorised, so the return is produced rather than reconstructed.
Why the books being here matters
It is the one thing a project tool cannot copy.
EstimateJob costInvoiceBankLedgerHST return
Buildertrend, Jobber and JobTread all hand your financials to QuickBooks. That seam is exactly where job-level truth is lost — and it is why they can show you what a job billed but not what it made.
When you should keep QuickBooks
Being straight about this, because moving your books is not a small decision.
- Your accountant works in QuickBooks and it is working. That relationship is worth more than any feature. Contrax exports what they need.
- You have complex payroll or multiple entities. Dedicated accounting software handles those better.
- You are in the US. The HST and WSIB work is the point, and it is worth nothing to you.
- You are not tracking job costs at all today. Start the habit however you can — the tool matters less than doing it.
What one job finally tells you
Quoted$18,400
Materials$4,180
Labour, burdened$6,090
Sub-trades$1,937
Margin34%
See what your last three jobs actually made.
Connect your bank, tag a month of costs to jobs, and look. Most contractors are surprised by at least one.
7 days free · no credit card · then $49.99/mo for 3 months
General information, not accounting advice · talk to your accountant about your own situation