Cost Accounting in Cedar Rapids, Iowa

A concrete contractor in Marion bid a driveway tear-out and pour at $8,400. He had done a hundred of them. The number felt right.

It took three days instead of two. The extra day of labor, a second dumpster pull, and half a pallet of material bought for that job but used on another one never got tracked back to it. His profit and loss showed a fine month. That single job made $340 on a bid he thought carried a $2,000 margin. He only found out because we had set up job costing the previous spring.

Cost accounting is how you find that out while you can still do something about it, rather than eighteen months later when the same mistake is baked into every bid.

Cost Accounting from a Cedar Rapids Accounting Firm

Cost accounting means tracking what a job actually costs, so you can compare it to what you charged.

Most small operators around here bid on experience and gut feel. That works until volume grows or costs move, and then it quietly stops working. As a Cedar Rapids accounting firm working mostly with trades, this is the single most common gap we find in otherwise healthy businesses. Everything else can be clean, the monthly bookkeeping current, and the owner still has no idea which work pays.

A profit and loss tells you whether the month was good. Cost accounting tells you which jobs made it good and which ones the good jobs had to carry.

Labor Burden, and Why Your Hourly Cost Is Not the Wage

This is where most bids go wrong, and it is the first thing we fix.

If you pay a guy $22 an hour, he does not cost you $22 an hour. Add employer payroll taxes, workers comp, unemployment insurance, and the time he spends loading, driving and fuelling equipment. For most Cedar Rapids trades the true cost lands between 18 and 32 percent above the wage.

At the low end that $22 becomes about $26. At the high end it is closer to $29. Bid a three-day job with two guys using the wage instead of the burdened rate and you have already given away $300 before anybody picks up a tool.

• Employer share of Social Security and Medicare
• Federal and Iowa unemployment insurance
• Workers compensation, which varies a lot by trade
• Paid time off, if you offer it
• Equipment time and fuel attached to the crew rather than the job
• Drive time between sites, which is real cost and rarely billed

We calculate your actual rate from your own payroll, not an industry average. Then every job gets costed at that number.

What Cost Accounting Tracks

Four things, tied to each job as the work happens rather than reconstructed later.

• Labor. Hours by person, at the burdened rate, on the job they were actually on.
• Materials. What was bought for the job, including what got moved to a different job later.
• Subcontractors. What you paid out, and whether the 1099 side is being tracked as you go.
• Equipment and other direct cost. Rental, dumpsters, permits, disposal fees.

Set up properly in QuickBooks Online this runs on projects and classes, so the reporting comes out of the same file that produces your financial statements. There is no separate spreadsheet to maintain, which matters because separate spreadsheets always stop getting updated by March.

What the Numbers Tell You

Once a few months of jobs are costed, patterns show up that are almost impossible to see any other way.

Which service lines actually pay

It is common to find that the work an owner considers his bread and butter runs at half the margin of something he treats as a sideline. Tear-outs versus new pours. Residential versus commercial. Maintenance contracts versus one-off calls.

Which customers cost you money

A customer who reworks scope, pays in ninety days, and needs three site visits before signing is not the same as one who does not, even at the same price. Cost accounting puts a number on that difference.

Where your estimates drift

If jobs consistently run twelve percent over on labor, that is not bad luck. That is your estimating formula, and it is fixable in an afternoon once you can see it.

Cost Accounting for Cedar Rapids Trades

What the work looks like depends a lot on what you do.

For concrete and framing crews around Cedar Rapids, Marion and Hiawatha, the pressure is on material waste and the third day that was supposed to be a second day. For landscaping and lawn care, it is route density and drive time. A Robins route with eleven stops in three miles and a Lisbon route with six stops across twelve miles can bill the same and earn very differently.

For cleaning companies the number that matters is profit by crew rather than by job, because the work is recurring. For anyone doing commercial or municipal work in Linn County, the job might be profitable while the cash arrives ninety days after materials were paid for, which is a timing problem rather than a margin problem and gets solved differently.

We work across the whole service area, out to Mt Vernon, Ely, Swisher, Springville, Bertram and Covington.

How We Set It Up

Usually a few weeks before the first useful report, because it needs a full job cycle to prove out.

Week one, the rate

We pull your payroll and work out your real burdened labor cost by role. If you have crews on different comp classes, they get different rates.

Week two, the file

Projects and classes get set up in QuickBooks Online, mapped to how you actually describe your work rather than a generic template. If the file needs repair first, that is a bookkeeping cleanup and we quote it separately.

Week three onward, the habit

Somebody has to code time and materials to jobs. Usually that is you or a lead, and it takes a few minutes a day. We handle the rest. Nothing works if this step gets skipped, and we would rather say that plainly than pretend the software does it alone.

Who This Fits, and Who It Does Not

It fits you if

You bid or quote work rather than billing a flat hourly rate. You have more than a couple of jobs running at once. And you have had at least one job you suspect lost money but could not prove.

It does not fit if

You do one job at a time on time and materials, where the P and L already tells you what you need. Or your books are far enough behind that there is nothing to cost yet, in which case cleanup comes first and job costing follows.

Why Cedar Rapids Owners Choose Us for This

We use your payroll, not an average

Burden rates from a national table are close to useless. Iowa unemployment rates and your specific workers comp class change the number meaningfully.

It lives in your accounting file

Job costing that sits in a separate spreadsheet dies within a season. Ours comes out of the same QuickBooks file as your financial statements, so the numbers always agree.

We tell you what the numbers mean

A report showing crew two at nine percent margin is only useful if somebody explains why and what to do. That conversation happens on the monthly call at no extra charge.

What Cost Accounting Costs

There is no separate job costing package to buy.

Setup is quoted flat, based on how many crews and service lines you run and what shape the file is in. Ongoing job costing is part of monthly bookkeeping, which starts at $350 a month. Full details are on the pricing page.

Getting Started

It starts with a free Books Health Check. Fifteen minutes, screen shared, your file open. We look at whether job costing is even possible on the file as it stands, and tell you honestly if cleanup has to come first.

Call (319) 382-9017 or use the contact page. You get a real reply within one business day.

What Else We Handle

If job costing is not quite what you came for, start here.

Questions Cedar Rapids Contractors Ask