No mystery, no black box. Here's exactly what happens after you book a call: what we handle, what we'll need from you, and when you'll see your numbers come into focus.
Most contractors have never had a good accounting handoff, just a shoebox of logins and a "we'll take it from here." We run onboarding like you'd run a job: a defined scope, a schedule, and clear responsibility for every task. Here's the plan we work from.
The 90-day plan below is the same for everyone. What changes is what your numbers look like at the end of it, because a service shop and a project contractor need different answers from their books.
Estimated, contracted jobs that span billing periods: custom builds, site work, scoped subcontracts.
High-volume, short-cycle work: service, repair, maintenance, residential installs billed on completion. No WIP needed, and we won't build you one.
Do both under one roof, with service techs and install crews? That's a hybrid shop, and your books get split so each side shows its own profit. It's a setup conversation, not a problem.
It starts with a discovery call: a full hour, so we can actually dig in. We talk through your trade, your size, how your jobs get billed, and where the books stand today. If we're a fit, you get a proposal with a defined scope and a flat monthly price. No hourly meter, no surprise invoices.
The first month is about seeing everything and fixing the foundation. We get access to your accounting system, bank feeds, and payroll, then run a full diagnostic: chart of accounts, job costing setup, how costs are coded, what the last year of statements actually say. You get a written picture of where things stand and a prioritized plan.
Cleanup gets executed and the structure gets rebuilt for construction: cost codes that match how you work, job costing that ties to the field, personal and business finally separated. Then we run your first proper monthly close, and you see your numbers the way they should have always looked.
By month three the books run on a rhythm: monthly close on a predictable schedule, your key reports updated every month, and a package you can actually make decisions from. With clean numbers in hand, we look forward: tax planning baseline, entity and software recommendations, and what bank or bond readiness would take if growth is the goal.
The 30-60-90 above is the typical path. Books that haven't been reconciled in years, multiple entities tangled together, or a mid-year software migration can stretch the cleanup phase. If your situation will, we tell you in the proposal, with the adjusted scope and price. You'll never discover a delay after you've signed. See how our pricing works.
Plan on the discovery call, a kickoff call, about an hour of granting access, and one review meeting a month. Altogether, a few hours across the first 90 days. We deliberately keep the owner's load light. You have a business to run.
Then you're our typical new client. Messy books change the timeline, not the process. A deep cleanup can stretch the first phase, and if it will, we say so in the proposal, not after. You'll know the scope and the price before you commit.
Not as a condition of working together. Most of the time the fix is setting up what you already have correctly. If your tools genuinely can't support job costing at your size, we'll show you why and recommend a move. That's a conversation with evidence, never a default.
No, and we won't build you one. WIP exists to match revenue to work on jobs that span billing periods. If your jobs open and close inside a month, what you need instead is job-level profitability: margin by job type, by truck, and by tech, pricing that provably covers overhead, and cash-flow planning for the slow season. That's exactly what your reporting package is built around.
Most clients feel it at the first clean monthly close, usually in month two, when they can see job-level profit for the first time. For project shops, the WIP schedule tends to be the wake-up moment: it's common to find significant unbilled work in the first draft. For service shops, it's usually discovering which job types or trucks have been quietly losing money.
A steady monthly rhythm: close, WIP, reporting package, review call. Tax planning happens through the year, not just in April. And as goals come up (bigger jobs, bonding, a new entity, a software move), the clean foundation makes each one a project instead of a crisis.
