Built on a solid foundation.
The accounting foundation and tax strategy for builders, developers, and real estate owners — from job costing to 1031 exchanges.
Books built for job sites, not just year-end
Construction bookkeeping isn't just categorizing expenses — it's tracking money at the project level, so you know which jobs are actually making money before the job is finished.
Job Costing
Every job gets its own ledger — labor, materials, subs, equipment — so you know your real margin on a project, not just your bank balance.
WIP Reports
Work-in-progress schedules show whether you're over- or under-billed on active jobs, catching cash flow problems before they catch you.
Progress Billing & Retainage
Change orders, retainage held by the GC, progress draws — all of it needs to hit your books the right way, or your financials stop meaning anything.
Cash, accrual, or percentage-of-completion?
Which method you use isn't just a bookkeeping preference — for many contracts, it's required, based on the size of your business and how long your jobs run.
Cash Method
Simplest to run, and often available if your average gross receipts fall under the IRS's small-business threshold and your contracts wrap up within two years.
Accrual Method
Income and expenses recorded when earned or incurred, not when cash moves — required above the small-business threshold, and often preferred by lenders and bonding companies regardless.
Percentage-of-Completion
Required for most long-term contracts once average gross receipts cross the IRS's inflation-adjusted threshold — revenue is recognized as the job progresses, not just at completion.
Completed-Contract Method
Defers revenue and expense recognition until a contract is finished — available to small contractors under the exception, but can obscure how a job is actually performing until it's done.
Outgrown a threshold, or realized a different method fits your business better? Changing methods means filing Form 3115 with the IRS — we handle that process for clients making the switch.
Put suspended rental losses to work now
Rental real estate losses are normally "passive" — stuck offsetting only passive income, piling up unused year after year. There are two ways around that.
Real Estate Professional Status
Generally, more than half your working hours and at least 750 hours a year in a real property trade or business qualifies you — and if you're already a contractor, handyman, or fence builder, you're halfway there already. Put a rental into service and your losses aren't locked up like everyone else's.
Short-Term Rentals
Average guest stay of 7 days or less (or 30 with meaningful services provided) isn't automatically treated as passive activity in the first place. Materially participate in running it, and losses can offset your other active income directly — no real estate professional status required.
Structure matters as much as strategy
Allocating income & losses
Partnerships can allocate profit, loss, and specific deductions differently among partners — useful when partners bring different capital, labor, or risk to the table.
Debt & basis
How debt is classified — recourse or nonrecourse — changes how much loss each partner can actually deduct. Getting this wrong is one of the most common ways real estate losses get disallowed.
GP vs. LP
General partner or limited partner status affects self-employment tax exposure and how actively you can be involved without changing your tax treatment.
Accelerate depreciation, defer gains
A cost segregation study reclassifies parts of a building — fixtures, flooring, land improvements — out of 27.5- or 39-year depreciation and into 5-, 7-, or 15-year categories instead. We don't perform the engineering study ourselves, but we know how to implement the results and coordinate with a cost-seg firm to make sure the deduction lands where it should on your return.
Cost Segregation
Turns a slow 27.5- or 39-year depreciation schedule into a much faster one, freeing up real deductions years earlier than a standard schedule would.
Traditional 1031 Exchange
Swap into like-kind real estate and defer the gain from the property you sold — the classic route, with strict identification and closing deadlines to manage.
The "Lazy" 1031
Buy new real estate and run a cost segregation study on it instead of a formal exchange — the resulting bonus depreciation can offset your gain, without the exchange's timelines. With 100% bonus depreciation now available for qualified improvements, this has become a genuinely powerful alternative.