✶Contractors & Trades
Know what every job actually made.
Job costing, progress billing, sub 1099s, and materials tracking. Books built the way contractors bid, build, and get paid.
Balance, PLLC provides bookkeeping for contractors and trades businesses in Woodbury, the Twin Cities, and western Wisconsin: job costing that shows real margin per project, progress billing and retainage tracking, subcontractor 1099 management, and materials and equipment cost capture. Scale-tier bookkeeping with job costing runs $1200 per month.
A contractor who does not know per-job margin is bidding blind. Balance sets up class and job tracking so every project carries its own labor, materials, subs, and overhead allocation, and the month-end report says which jobs made money, not just whether the company did.
✶Contractors & Trades
Built for how jobs really run
Job costing that matches your bids
Labor, materials, subs, equipment, and overhead tracked per job, in the same cost codes you estimate with. Margin per project, visible monthly.
Progress billing and deposits
Draws, milestones, deposits, and retainage create timing gaps between cash and earned revenue. Accrual-capable books keep both stories straight.
Subcontractor compliance
W-9s collected up front, payments tracked all year, 1099s filed at $15 per form in January instead of a February scramble.
The truck-cab receipt pile
Supply-house runs, fuel, and small tools get photographed on the spot with Hubdoc and coded to the right job before the receipt fades.
Where most contractors & trades start
Scale Bookkeeping
$1200 per month with accrual, class and job tracking, and financial dashboards.
See plan →Payroll & HR
Crew payroll with state registrations and certified-payroll-ready records.
See plan →Full Back Office
Books, payroll, and AP in one crew for contractors past the owner-does-everything stage.
See plan →I was having trouble entering invoices into the accounting application, it’s just not in my wheelhouse. So I hand my receipts and invoices over to realizebalance and the next day I have templates customized to each individual vendor. Now every category I need is popping up automatically, in the same order it appears on the invoice. That one little move is going to save me hours of time and miles of stress off my heart!
Ryan Carstensen
Owner, Ooptrades
✶Good Questions
Contractors & Trades questions
Can you set up job costing in QuickBooks or Xero?
Yes. Balance builds class and job tracking that mirrors your estimating cost codes, so bids and actuals line up and every closed job teaches the next bid something.
How do you handle subcontractor 1099s?
W-9s are collected at vendor setup, payments are tracked through the year, and 1099-NEC forms are filed at $15 per form. No January panic.
We are a husband-and-wife shop. Is this overkill?
Not at all. Small operations usually start at the $650 Core plan, and S-corp owner payroll is $300 per month. The system scales when the crew does.
We get each other.
Start with a free consultation. Bring the weird stuff, that is the fun part.