Materials and suppliers
Trade accounts, hardware runs, fuel and hire charges across multiple suppliers, most of them on statement rather than invoice.
TRADES & BUILDERS
Bookkeeping for tradies and builders.
You are on site all day. The bookkeeping is whatever is left at nine o'clock, and it usually is not much. That is how a trade business ends up three quarters behind without anything actually going wrong.
WHAT MAKES IT HARDER
Trade businesses generate a lot of small transactions.
The volume is not the problem on its own. It is the volume combined with nobody having time to touch it until a deadline forces the issue.
Subcontractors
Invoices arriving in every format imaginable, with the employee-versus-contractor question sitting behind them.
Progress claims and retentions
Money invoiced but not yet received, and retentions held long enough that they drop out of everyone's memory.
Equipment and finance
Vehicle and plant purchases, chattel mortgages and hire purchase arrangements that need to be recorded properly, not as an expense.
Cash flow timing
Materials paid for now, the job invoiced later, and the customer paying later still. The gap has to be visible before it bites.
Owner and business mixing
The ute, the phone, the odd personal purchase on the business card. Easy to do, tedious to unpick a year later.
WHAT WE DO ABOUT IT
Make the routine fit how you actually work.
Get the volume under control
- Supplier statements reconciled rather than paid on trust
- Receipts captured as they happen instead of at BAS time
- Consistent coding so job and expense reporting means something
- Equipment and finance transactions recorded correctly
- Owner drawings separated from business spending
Keep the money moving
- Invoices raised on completion, not weeks later
- Overdue accounts and outstanding retentions followed up
- Payroll and subcontractor admin kept to a cycle
- Super tracked against quarterly due dates
- BAS periods prepared from a file that is already finished