Construction and Renovation

How we think about construction and renovation

Treat each job as a small business of its own. It has a price, a budget, a crew, a supplier list and a finish date. Your ledger should be able to report on one job at a time. If it only reports on the company as a whole, a strong quarter of new-build draws can hide a renovation that has lost money since the drywall came down.

Coquitlam hands contractors two very different kinds of work:

• New builds up the hill. Burke Mountain is still filling in with detached houses and townhomes. That means long contracts, progress draws and a chain of subtrades waiting on each stage.
• Renovations below it. Across Westwood Plateau and Maillardville, with its older housing stock, the work is mostly opening up existing homes. Scopes change mid-job and change orders come in by text.

Plenty of firms do both. So the books have to carry a year-long build and a three-week bathroom side by side, without squeezing either one into the other's shape.

What makes the books different

• Costs coded as they arrive. Supplier bills, crew hours and subtrade invoices get a job number when they're entered, not in a year-end scramble. That's how a renovation's change orders show up against its original estimate while you can still price the next one properly.
• Holdbacks on both sides of the ledger. BC's Builders Lien Act requires the payer to retain a 10% holdback. On a Burke Mountain build you usually sit in the middle: the owner holds back from you, and you hold back from your trades. We keep a receivable and a payable for each job and note when the holdback period should end. Under the Act, that's generally 55 days after a certificate of completion is issued or the work is completed or abandoned.
• Subtrade totals for the T5018. When construction is more than half of what your business does to earn income, the CRA expects a T5018 slip for every subcontractor paid more than $500 in the year, before GST/HST. We keep a running total per subcontractor from the first cheque, so slip season is a report, not a hunt.
• PST is part of the material cost. Under BC's rules for real property contractors, you generally pay PST on taxable materials you buy to fulfil a contract, such as the lumber and drywall that become part of the house. That tax belongs in the job cost. A bill coded with the wrong tax treatment skews the job report and the PST return together.

What a monthly close looks like for you

Your part is three things: the month's draw requests, any signed change orders, and the subtrade invoices still sitting in the truck. Then we:

1. Reconcile the bank, credit cards and your trade accounts at the lumber yard and wholesalers
2. Code every bill and timesheet to a job, and keep true overhead in overhead
3. Record each draw against its contract and split the holdback out on both sides
4. Spread payroll costs across jobs by the hours the crew logged
5. Update each subcontractor's running total for the T5018

By the 10th, a job report lands in your inbox with contract value, billed to date, cost to date, held back and left to bill for every open project, alongside the usual statements and a short note on anything that moved. Our guide for Coquitlam owner-operators explains the wider monthly rhythm.

Tools we commonly use for construction clients

• Ledger: QuickBooks Online (Projects plus classes) or Xero (tracking categories)
• Receipts: Dext, so a bill can be photographed on site the day it's handed over
• Time: whatever crew app your team will actually open, with hours tagged by job
• Estimating: your existing estimating or scheduling software stays put; we map its job numbers and budgets into the ledger

Partners we work with

We don't name firms on this page. These are the kinds of people we work alongside, and we're happy to suggest where to start:

• CPA firms with construction clients, for jobs that straddle your year-end and for the corporate return
• Construction lawyers, for lien claims and contract disputes; we keep the records they ask for in order
• Insurance and bonding brokers, who often want current statements before renewing a policy or a bond
• Lenders, when a spec build or new equipment needs financing

A good fit if

• You build on Burke Mountain, renovate across Coquitlam, or both, with several jobs open at once
• You pay trades by draw and want holdbacks and T5018 totals handled as the year goes, not at the end
• You want each job's margin every month, while there's still time to act on it