Construction and trades
Alpine Accounts provides bookkeeping, job costing and management accounts for builders, subcontractors and trade businesses in Hervey Bay, the Fraser Coast and across Australia. The central problem in construction is knowing which jobs make money, which requires costs to be captured against the job as they occur rather than pooled and reviewed annually. The work also covers progress claims and retentions, subcontractor payments, and payroll for crews whose hours and locations change week to week.
Job costing is the whole game
A trade business with a healthy annual profit can be losing money on a third of its jobs and never know. Without job level costing, the good work subsidises the bad work invisibly, and the quoting never improves because there is no feedback loop.
Capturing labour, materials, plant and subcontractor cost against each job makes the comparison between quoted and actual possible. That single change usually pays for the bookkeeping several times over, because it corrects the pricing on everything that follows.
Progress claims, retentions and the cash gap
Construction cash flow is brutal because you fund materials and wages well before the claim is certified and paid, and a retention sits unpaid for months after practical completion. Retentions that are never followed up are pure lost profit, and they are lost quietly.
Tracking claims, certifications, retentions and their release dates turns that from a memory exercise into a schedule.
Subcontractors and payroll
Subcontractor versus employee classification carries real consequences, including superannuation obligations that apply to some contractors regardless of what the agreement calls them. Records are kept so the position is clear and defensible, and anything that looks inconsistent is flagged rather than processed quietly.
Common questions
Can you set up job costing in my existing software?
Yes. Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks Online all support job or project tracking, sometimes with a construction specific add on for larger operations. The setup matters more than the platform.
Do you handle progress claims and retentions?
Yes, tracked against each job with certification and release dates, so retentions get followed up rather than forgotten.
We are on the road all day. How does this work practically?
Receipts are captured from the phone at the point of spending, bank feeds code the predictable items automatically, and the job allocation happens in the file rather than on a clipboard. The aim is that nothing needs to happen at a desk in the evening.