Per-job truth — not one blurred P&L.

Coding every dollar of labor, materials, subcontractors, and equipment to the specific job that consumed it — so each project carries its own P&L instead of disappearing into one blurred company total. Done properly inside QuickBooks, job costing answers the only question that matters per project: did this job actually make money, and where did it leak if it didn't?

Work in progress is the accounting bridge between what you've spent on unfinished jobs and what you've billed for them. Without it, a contractor's P&L whipsaws — months look falsely rich when big invoices go out and falsely poor when costs land first. WIP tracking smooths the story to the truth: earned versus billed, job by job, so the monthly numbers mean something.

As its own receivable, separate from regular AR. The retainage an owner holds back until completion is money you've earned but can't collect yet — and if it's blended into normal receivables, your collections picture lies to you. We track retainage receivable (and retainage you hold on subs, payable) distinctly, so cash expectations match contract reality.

The bookkeeping side, yes: subcontractor payments tracked cleanly by payee all year, W-9 documentation kept current, and year-end totals organized so your 1099 filings are a handoff, not a scramble. The filings themselves and any tax determinations — employee-vs-contractor questions above all — belong with your CPA; we keep the records that make their answer easy.

Yes — it's a cleanup with a construction-shaped order of operations: rebuild the transaction record, then allocate to jobs from invoices, timesheets, and supplier records as far as the documentation supports, and tell you plainly where history is too blurred to allocate. Going forward, the structure makes job costing automatic rather than archaeological.

They're two ways of deciding when a long job's revenue and cost hit the books. Completed-contract waits until the job is done, which is simple but makes your P&L lurch — nothing, nothing, then a whole job lands at once. Percentage-of-completion recognizes revenue and cost as the job progresses, so each month reflects the work actually done and your margins read true along the way. For contractors running multi-month jobs, percentage-of-completion matches revenue to the work done each month, and it's the basis a lender or bonding company may ask to see. The method that's right for your tax filing is a determination for your CPA; we keep the books and the job-cost detail so either can be produced cleanly.

As first-class events on the job, because they're where construction profit quietly leaks. A change order alters the contract value and the cost of a job, and if it's done on a handshake and never recorded, the job's budget-versus-actual goes wrong and work gets performed that never gets billed. We track change orders against the job they belong to — the added contract value and the added cost — so the job's real margin stays accurate and nothing approved gets left off an invoice.