Why does Contrax not charge for December?

Because a contractor's year is not flat. December is two weeks of nobody answering the phone. Contrax does not bill for December, every year, for every customer — eleven payments a year, not twelve. Data and crew clock-in stay live; the charge simply does not happen.

Does Contrax charge per user?

No. A free Starter plan, or a flat monthly price up to CAD $150, covers the whole company with unlimited users. Charging per seat means contractors leave crew off the software to save money, and then the software has half the data.

Is there a contract or annual lock-in?

No. Contrax is month to month, cancel any time. Your data is exportable at any point and Contrax will help you move it if you leave.

Why choose Contrax over Jobber, Buildertrend or Procore?

Each is strong at the slice it was built for: Jobber for service dispatch, Buildertrend for custom home builders, Procore for large commercial general contractors, QuickBooks for the books. They share one shape - the job lives in one system and the accounting lives in another, connected by a sync. Contrax keeps both on one set of records, so an accepted estimate becomes the contract, budget and schedule without re-entry, and approved crew hours feed job costing and payroll together. On a typical bathroom renovation that is roughly 31 manual entries in a standard stack versus 4 approvals in Contrax.

What makes Contrax different from other contractor software?

Most contractor platforms keep accounting in a separate system and bridge to it - Buildertrend syncs two ways with QuickBooks, Jobber syncs to QuickBooks, Procore integrates with ERPs. A sync can lag, drop a vendor name, or land a cost on the company rather than the job. Contrax was built as a single system inside a working renovation company, so data moves between modules instead of being re-keyed or bridged.

Does Contrax replace my accountant?

No. Contrax replaces most of what a bookkeeper does month to month — categorising, receipt capture, reconciling and keeping the books current, roughly $300 to $800 a month in Canada. An accountant is still needed for year-end, HST filing and the corporate return.

How much does Contrax cost compared to a normal software stack?

A typical small contractor runs accounting software, a bookkeeper, job management or CRM per seat, an estimating tool and time tracking — roughly CAD $520 to $1,390 a month across five systems that do not share data. Contrax is free to start ($150 a month for everything) for the whole company, unlimited users and AI included.

Renovation contractors, general contractors and trades businesses with 1 to 25 people, primarily in Ontario and across Canada. It is not aimed at large commercial general contractors or single-trade service-call businesses.

Why Contrax

Every other option still makes you the data entry clerk.

Jobber, Buildertrend, Procore, QuickBooks — they are good software, and each is genuinely strong at the slice it was built for. They also all share one shape: the job lives in one system and the money lives in another, with a sync between them. So the estimate doesn’t become the budget, the hours don’t become the payroll, and the receipt doesn’t become the job cost. You do that. Every time. At night.

Contrax is the one where the numbers move themselves. Not because we have more features — because it was built as one system instead of assembled from several.

Guide · From one truck to $5M How to scale your renovation company. The three departments, the nine stops every job travels, and the systems that let the business run without you, with where Contrax does the work at each one. Read the guide →

The honest test

Count the times you type the same number.

I counted this on one of my own jobs — a bathroom gut in Whitby, $13,020, quoted on a Tuesday and invoiced six weeks later. Every moment below is a place where somebody types a number the system already had.

Counted by Cameron Ramsauer, Ramsauer Renovations, Oshawa — the same job run both ways. Your count will differ. Run one and see.

Typical stack

Estimating tool + CRM + QuickBooks + a bookkeeper

31~~manual entries, one job~~

Retype the estimate into the job management tool as a project

Rebuild the budget by hand so it matches the quote

Copy the scope into a contract template

Export timesheets, re-key the hours into payroll

Re-key the same hours again as job cost

Photograph receipts, email them to the bookkeeper, wait

Bookkeeper cleans up card buys by journal entry — the job tag is lost

Write the change order from scratch, look up the rates again

Update the contract total. And the budget. Separately.

Build the invoice by reading back through everything

Re-enter the invoice in the accounting software

At year end, work out whether the job made money

Most of those are the same figures travelling between systems that cannot see each other. Each one is a chance to be wrong — and nobody finds out until the job is closed. It is also why contractors report job cost reporting running two to four weeks behind reality.

Contrax

One system, one set of records

4~~decisions, no re-entry~~

✓

Walk the job with your phone. The takeoff prices it off your rate book.

✓

Send it. Accepted → contract, budget and schedule exist. No re-entry.

✓

Approve the week’s hours once. Feeds job costing and payroll together.

✓

Approve the invoice. Built from hours and costs already on the job.

✓

Receipts post themselves to the job and the books as they arrive

✓

Change orders price off the same rate book and move all three totals

✓

Profit on the job is current, not reconstructed in March

Four approvals. Everything else is the system carrying numbers it already had. That is what “connected” is actually worth.

Everyone sells all-in-one. Almost nobody removes the typing.

Being fair about it

What the alternatives are genuinely good at.

You should pick the right tool, and sometimes that is not us. Here is the honest version — including where you would still be doing the typing.

Option

Genuinely good at

What you still do by hand

Jobber

Service work, dispatch, recurring visits. Genuinely excellent on mobile.

Priced per user — seats beyond your plan’s cap are extra, so putting the whole crew in costs more. Accounting is a QuickBooks sync, not native.

Buildertrend

Custom home builders, client selections, long timelines. Unlimited users included.

Priced for bigger builders, and the books are a two-way QuickBooks sync — two systems, one bridge, and vendor-name mismatches fail quietly.

Procore

Large commercial GCs, compliance, dozens of subs. Unlimited users.

Priced on annual construction volume, quoted by sales only. Contractors report $15k–$80k a year — a scale a 6-person reno shop will never reach.

QuickBooks alone

Bookkeeping and filing, and it does have estimates and Projects. Your accountant already knows it.

Job costing sits on a general ledger, not a cost engine. Card buys cleaned up by journal entry lose their job tag, and the picture is historical — you learn after the fact.

Spreadsheets

Free, flexible, yours. Genuinely fine at ten jobs a year.

All of it. And the sheet never finds out how the job actually finished.

Notice the pattern. Every one of them is strong at the slice it was built for, and every one of them leaves a seam where you carry the numbers across. The seam is the product. Not the features on either side of it.

Why they can’t just fix this

It isn’t a feature they forgot.

They were separate companies

Most “all-in-one” platforms got there by acquisition or by bolting on an integration. Two databases with a sync between them behaves like two databases. You cannot refactor that into one spine without rebuilding the product.

The books are always a bridge

Every one of them keeps accounting in a different system and syncs to it. Buildertrend pushes to QuickBooks two ways; Jobber syncs; Procore integrates with ERPs. A bridge is not a backbone — it can drop a vendor name, lag a day, or land a cost on the company instead of the job.

Nobody was running jobs

Contrax was built inside a working renovation company in Oshawa, to run that company. Each part was added because the one before it had a loose end. You only find those seams if you are the one losing the evening to them.

The compounding bit

And it gets further ahead, not closer.

Two things improve on their own. The AI models underneath get better every few months — sharper video takeoffs and better reasoning about your rate book, without a line of code changing.

More importantly, the system learns your business. Every job that closes against its estimate corrects your rate book, and that gap between quoted and actual only exists because both live in the same place. A competitor can license the same models tomorrow. They cannot have your last two hundred jobs.

The money

One price, whole company.

No per-seat maths, so putting the whole crew in costs nothing extra — which is the point, because the crew is where the data starts.

Accounting software

$40 – $90

Bookkeeper — to key in what the software already saw

$300 – $800

Job management / CRM per seat

$100 – $250

Estimating tool

$50 – $150

Time tracking per seat

$30 – $100

Five logins that don’t talk

$520 – $1,390

Contrax — unlimited users, AI included

$150

Straight about the bookkeeping

Contrax does not replace your accountant. It replaces most of what a bookkeeper does month to month — categorising, receipt capture, reconciling, keeping the books current — which runs $300–$800 a month in Canada to have someone key in what Contrax already captured.

You still want an accountant for year-end, HST filing, your corporate return and how you pay yourself. What changes is what you hand them: clean current books cost less to close than a year of receipts in a box.

Plain answers

So what is it, exactly?

Is Contrax estimating software? Yes — priced, scoped estimates from a walkthrough video or written scope, on your own rates.

Is Contrax job costing software? Yes — hours, supplier invoices and receipts post to the job, so estimated vs actual is live while it is still open.

Is Contrax bookkeeping and financial software? Yes — invoicing, payables, receivables, bank feed and HST-ready books, from the same numbers as the job costing.

Is Contrax budgeting software for a construction business? Yes — a live budget per job, rolled up into company cash flow.

Is Contrax time tracking and payroll software? Yes — crew clock in by phone, the office approves once, and it feeds costing and payroll.

Who is it for? Renovation and trades contractors running 1–25 people, mostly in Ontario and across Canada. If you are a large commercial GC on Procore, or a single-trade service business doing forty stops a week, this isn’t aimed at you — and we’d rather say so now.

Bring a real job. Count the typing.

A month free, no card. Quote something you’ve already built and see how many times you have to enter the same number.

Start free trial → Starter free, paid plans from $80 CAD/month for the whole company after · unlimited users · December is free every year
Built in Oshawa, Ontario by a contractor who still runs jobs with it