QuickBooks was built for retail. Sage 300 Contractor and Foundation were built for a desktop in 2003. We built construction accounting in the browser, on the same data your bid and project already live on — so job costing isn't a month-end ritual and WIP isn't a panicked spreadsheet.
| Code | Item | Budget | Actual | Var | % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 03 30 00 | Concrete | $ 42,500 | $ 39,200 | −3,300 | 92% |
| 04 22 00 | CMU Walls | $ 87,200 | $ 89,840 | +2,640 | 103% |
| 09 91 23 | Paint | $ 12,800 | $ 11,100 | −1,700 | 87% |
| 26 50 00 | Lighting | $ 19,500 | $ 4,200 | n/a | 22% |
| Totals to date | $ 162,000 | $ 144,340 | −2,360 | 89% |
Most construction subs run accounting software designed for restaurants. The chart of accounts is wrong. Pay apps are manual. Retainage is a custom field. Job costing means tagging every invoice three times. And the WIP report — the single number that tells you whether the company is healthy — is a monthly heroic effort by your bookkeeper.
We built construction accounting from the ground up. GL, AP/AR, pay apps, WIP, job costing — all of it native, all of it on the same data the rest of the platform uses.
Every transaction lands in the GL, tied to a job and a cost code. So job costing is a byproduct of the entry — not a second round of tagging at month-end.
Sage 300 charges you to enable a second entity. Foundation needs a consultant to set it up. Roll multiple LLCs into one Leviathan tenant — separate books per entity, consolidated WIP on top, and an intercompany journal that doesn't require a CPA on the phone.
Sage 300 makes your AP person re-key every invoice. Vista makes them tag it three times. We extract the data from the PDF, match it to the PO, and queue it for approval. Your clerk reviews exceptions instead of typing line items.
Customer invoices and AR aging by bucket. Know which GCs are slow-paying and which are about to become a problem.
QuickBooks has no concept of a G702. Most subs work around it with a Word template and a calculator. We ship G702/G703 native — schedule of values, progress billing, retainage, lien waiver fields. The pay app draws from the bid you already built.
Standalone systems make you tag every invoice — three times, in three places. Ours tags it once, at entry, against the project and cost code it belongs to. The variance report is current. The margin is real. The month-end ritual is shorter.
Project margin rollup, cost-to-complete, earned vs. billed. The number your CPA wants — without the month-end fire drill.
Estimating set the budget. Construction Mgmt updated it with change orders. Time Tracking fed labor cost. Accounting is where it all meets the actual: invoices paid, pay apps submitted, margin computed. Real-time, not month-end.
Bid line items become budget targets. Every actual cost lands against an estimate line so variance analysis is automatic.
Labor cost rolls into job costing per project, per cost code, per pay period. Payroll export carries the gross wages.
Change orders update budgets. PMs see margin impact before signing. Pay apps draw from the same schedule of values that built the bid.
Stop reconciling between systems. The same data feeds the bid, the project, and the books. Month-end runs in hours, not days.
Real-time WIP. Real-time margin. The CFO view, without waiting for the accountant to get back to you with an updated spreadsheet.
Standard construction WIP. Job costing by cost code. The reports your tax filing actually needs, formatted the way your CPA expects them.
For construction-specific work, yes. The GL is full double-entry. AP, AR, pay apps, and job costing are native — and built to handle retainage, cost codes, and AIA pay apps without workarounds.
Yes. Standard journal entries and a chart of accounts your CPA already understands. WIP reports formatted the way most accountants present them.
Yes. Per-project retainage tracking on pay apps and AR aging. Released retainage flows back through the same accounts so the books stay tidy.
Yes. Vendor invoices flow through extraction and PO matching. Approval still happens with a human in the loop — OCR speeds the data entry, not the decision.
Talk to us about your structure. Multi-entity is supported on the higher tier and we'll walk through what makes sense for your books.
Book a 30-minute consultation and we'll walk through how a real project of yours would look in the GL, with the pay app, and on the WIP report — using your actual data.