Michigan Construction Accounting Services

About Our Firm

Excel Complete provides construction accounting services focused on job costing, WIP schedules, margin tracking, forecasting, and reliable monthly financial reporting. As a CPA-led firm with software development capabilities, we help construction companies improve accounting workflows, reporting accuracy, and operational visibility through better systems, structured data, and streamlined processes.

Schedule a free call to review your construction accounting needs and discuss next steps. Most calls are led by our principal consultant, Allen Frantsen, a licensed Michigan CPA who has extensive experience in construction WIP reporting, job costing, and workflow automation. You’ll speak directly with an expert to get guidance on these construction accounting services and how they can help improve your organization.

Construction Accounting Cost

Construction accounting services start at $3,000 per month, depending on project volume, reporting requirements, and overall complexity. Services include month-end close support, financial reporting, WIP schedules, and system reviews. Additional reporting, ERP improvements, and custom software solutions increase pricing.

For new clients, we offer a one-day on-site engagement for $1,200. We review your accounting, job costing, and reporting, meet with your team, and assess your current systems and workflows. At the end of the session, you receive a clear roadmap for improving your financials, reporting, and operations. On-site consulting is available for organizations near our Ann Arbor, Michigan office, including:

• Detroit, MI
• Grand Rapids, MI
• Toledo, OH
• Akron, OH
• Columbus, OH
• Chicago, IL
• Cleveland, OH
• Cincinnati, OH
• Pittsburgh, PA
• Indianapolis, IN

On-site consulting is available for additional locations; travel costs may vary.

Our Process

1) Understand

We start by understanding your business, current accounting setup, and how data flows through your systems. This includes reviewing your financials, job costing, and reporting, and identifying where processes break down or lack visibility.

2) Manage and Report

We take over day to day accounting, including bookkeeping, monthly financials, and job costing. We structure your reporting to provide clear visibility into margins, project performance, and overall financial health.

3) Improve

We improve the systems behind your accounting. This includes refining ERP setups, building workflows, and organizing your data to support better reporting, forecasting, and operational decisions.

Financial Reporting

Accurate financial statements provide the foundation for managing and growing a construction business. Our financial statement services include support to close your books on time each month, accounting changes, and balance sheet cleanups, all to ensure you have the reports needed for both management and external reporting.

Financial reporting includes:

• Monthly balance sheets
• Income statements
• Cash flow statements
• Comparative financial reporting
• Budget vs. actual reporting
• Management reporting
• Financial analysis

Monthly Financial Close

We help construction companies establish efficient monthly closing workflows that produce timely financial statements.

Our month-end close process includes:

• Bank reconciliations
• Reviewing unusual costs
• WIP adjustments
• Account reconciliations
• Improved workflows

Lender Reporting

Banks and bonding companies rely on accurate financial information when evaluating construction companies. We prepare reporting packages that help businesses satisfy financing and bonding requirements.

Reporting may include:

• Bank reporting packages
• Covenant reporting
• Forecasts and projections

Cash to Accrual Adjustments

Many growing contractors eventually need to transition from cash to accrual for accounting. We help businesses convert accounting methods and make the adjusting journal entries to support GAAP-compliant financial statements.

Reasons companies convert include:

• Bank financing
• Bonding requirements
• GAAP compliance
• Larger construction contracts
• More accurate profitability reporting

Balance Sheet Cleanup

An inaccurate balance sheet makes it difficult to trust financial reports. We identify and resolve accounting issues so that your financial statements accurately reflect your business's financial position.

Common cleanup projects include:

• Reconciliations
• Fixed assets
• Loan accounts
• Accounts receivable
• Accounts payable
• Work-in-progress balances

Monthly WIP Schedules

Work-in-progress (WIP) schedules are critical for construction companies to track job profitability, revenue recognition, and over/under billing. Many firms struggle to maintain accurate WIP schedules due to disconnected systems, manual spreadsheets, and inconsistent project data.

We help construction companies build and maintain reliable WIP schedules by connecting accounting systems, job cost data, and billing records into a single reporting workflow. This ensures each project reflects accurate percent complete, earned revenue, and margin at any point in time.

• Standardize WIP reporting across all projects
• Automate data pulls from accounting or ERP systems
• Reconcile job cost, billing, and revenue recognition
• Identify overbilling and underbilling early
• Streamline monthly close and reporting cycles

Job Costing

We help construction companies track project-level costs. Labor, materials, subcontractors, equipment, and overhead are organized per job, creating a reliable foundation for profitability analysis. We spend time creating custom GL mapping and ERP integrations to improve this part of reporting.

Beyond traditional job costing, we develop productivity metrics and labor models that enable organizations to estimate future project costs, evaluate staffing requirements, and identify opportunities for operational improvement. These models are integrated directly with ERP systems and are user-friendly, helping users quickly plan future projects.

Margin Analysis

We analyze project profitability by comparing budgeted numbers for the main project areas, including labor, materials, subcontractors, equipment, and overhead. Our reporting highlights which projects, or customers, generate the strongest returns or cause the most margin losses.

Our work is typically integrated into real-time dashboards, giving stakeholders access to data when they need it. Most dashboards are interactive, allowing users to document the reasons behind performance changes. These insights can be incorporated into forecasting models to improve budgeting and planning for future projects. We integrate directly with ERP systems and custom-built solutions.

System Improvements

We improve the systems behind your accounting so data flows cleanly from operations to financials. This includes refining ERP setups, standardizing job and cost structures, and building reporting workflows that eliminate manual steps and delays. The goal is to make everything easier to track, reconcile, and maintain on an ongoing basis.

Once your systems are structured correctly, we can go deeper. This includes connecting reporting tools, improving data visibility, and enabling better analysis across projects. With clean data and consistent workflows, you can move beyond basic reporting into margin analysis, forecasting, and more advanced decision-making around pricing, cost control, and operations.

We also support and build on top of common construction accounting and project systems, including:

• QuickBooks
• Foundation
• Oracle Construction
• Spectrum (Trimble)
• Accubid
• ProjectSight

These improvements allow your accounting, project management, and reporting systems to work together, giving you more reliable data and a clearer view of your business.

Benchmarking

We offer annual benchmarking to help you understand how your business compares to others in the construction industry. Because we manage your accounting, much of this analysis is based directly on your financials and reporting. Data is aggregated and anonymized across clients to provide insight into margins, cost structure, and key performance metrics, helping guide decisions around pricing, cost control, and overall operations.

For clients who want additional insight, we offer an optional survey that includes operational and workforce metrics, such as organizational structure, employee data, and standard measures like NPS. This provides a broader view beyond financials and helps identify opportunities to improve team performance and operations.

Frequently Asked Questions

Below are answers to common questions about our construction accounting services.

Do you manage WIP schedules?

Yes, Excel Complete fully manages, builds, and reconciles monthly WIP schedules. Our team combines CPA expertise with software development to enable custom WIP reporting workflows.

Can you create a construction chart of accounts and job cost structure?

Excel Complete can design a chart of accounts and job costing structures, along with a tailored reporting system. As both CPAs and software developers, Excel Complete can integrate with ERP systems, databases, and custom reporting environments using APIs and ODBC connections.

Can Excel be used for construction accounting?

Yes. Excel is commonly used for construction accounting, including WIP schedules, job costing, forecasting, budgeting, and project reporting. However, as construction companies add projects and operational complexity increases, lightweight web-based and database-driven tools often become easier to manage and scale.

Can you close our books each month?

Yes. Excel Complete will handle the full month-end close process, including account reconciliations, journal entries, WIP schedules, accruals, and financial and management reporting packages.

Do you provide construction balance sheet services?

Excel Complete manages and analyzes balance sheet accounts, including WIP, retainage, accounts receivable, deferred revenue, and debt covenants. We help ensure balances are accurate and supported by underlying schedules to guide the business.