Construction Bookkeeping for Builders and Trades Businesses

Construction bookkeeping is financial record keeping built around projects rather than the business as a whole. Every cost, from materials to subbie invoices, is coded to a specific job so you can see profit per project. It also covers construction-specific items like progress claims, retention and work in progress that general bookkeeping never touches.

Bookkeeping for construction companies is project-based, and no two jobs run the same. Income arrives in lumpy progress payments, retention holds back money you’ve already earned, and costs land across materials, labour and subbies at different times. Standard bookkeeping records all this as one blended pool. Construction bookkeeping keeps each job separate, so margins stay visible.

Job costing assigns every expense to the project it belongs to. Supplier bills, timesheets and subcontractor invoices are coded against a job number in Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks, then compared with what you quoted. The result is a live margin per job, which shows cost overruns while there’s still time to act, not after final payment.

Progress claims are recorded as invoices raised against each project stage, while retention is tracked separately as money earned but withheld, commonly 5% of the contract value. We record when each retention amount falls due and follow it up. Unbilled work sits as work in progress, so your reports show what you’ve done, not just what you’ve invoiced.

The Taxable Payments Annual Report (TPAR) is an ATO report of payments made to contractors, and most building and construction businesses that pay subcontractors must lodge it by 28 August each year. We keep contractor details and payment records clean through the year, so the report is ready to lodge rather than a scramble every August.

Payday super, which applies from 1 July 2026, requires super contributions to reach employees’ funds within 7 days of each payday instead of quarterly. For construction crews on weekly pay runs, that means super leaves your account every week. We build it into the payroll process so the timing looks after itself.

Construction bookkeeping runs on Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks, usually connected to a job management tool like simPRO, Tradify or ServiceM8 that feeds timesheets and job costs into the accounts. We work across all three accounting platforms, so you keep the software your team already knows rather than switching systems.

Construction bookkeeping with Hopkan Partners is a fixed monthly fee, agreed upfront based on your transaction volume, number of active jobs and how much reporting depth you want. There’s no hourly billing, so a phone call never turns into an invoice. You’ll know your exact bookkeeping cost for the year from day one.

Yes. Hopkan Partners is a Sydney bookkeeping firm, and we work remotely with construction businesses across Australia. Everything runs through cloud software, secure document sharing and video reviews, so it works the same whether your sites are in Western Sydney or interstate.

A construction business should consider outsourcing bookkeeping when the owner can’t say which jobs made money last quarter, when BAS or TPAR deadlines start slipping, or when admin eats hours that belong on site. If your books only tell you what you earned in total, not per project, that’s the signal.