Exterior & Building Envelope

Material costs can eat your margins when they're not tracked by job. We help roofers, siding contractors, and exterior trades see which projects actually profit.

The Trade

Exterior work means big material purchases before anyone touches a ladder. A roofing job might need $10,000 in shingles and underlayment before your crew shows up. Siding contractors stock enough product to cover multiple jobs at once. Window installers carry inventory that ties up cash for weeks. These upfront costs create pressure that other trades don’t feel as intensely.

In Utah, you’re also working around weather. Roofing and siding slow down when winter hits the Wasatch Front. Masonry can stop entirely when temperatures drop below 40 degrees. This seasonality creates cash flow patterns that look different from other construction businesses. Your financials need to account for busy months subsidizing slower ones.

Who This Covers

Roofing contractors, siding contractors, masonry contractors, insulation contractors, window and door installers. Anyone working on the exterior envelope of residential or commercial buildings from Provo to Salt Lake City.

What Makes It Different

Material costs often represent 40 to 50 percent of each job. Weather delays are common and hard to predict. Warranty callbacks happen months or years after the original work. Larger commercial projects involve progress billing and retainage that need careful tracking.

What We Handle

We track every job separately. Materials, labor, equipment rentals, subcontractor costs. Each project gets its own cost breakdown so you can see actual profit margins. This matters because a roofing job that looked profitable on paper might be underwater once you account for material waste, weather delays, and the callback you handled six months later.

For contractors doing commercial or larger residential work, progress billing creates its own accounting needs. You’re billing in phases, holding retainage, and managing cash flow against completion percentages. We set this up correctly in QuickBooks so your receivables reflect what you’re actually owed at each stage of the project.

Job Costing That Works

Every material purchase gets allocated to the right job. Labor hours tracked by project. Equipment rentals assigned correctly. You see true profitability on each job instead of your best guess based on the bid versus the final invoice.

Material Tracking

Bulk material purchases need to be allocated as they’re used, not expensed when purchased. We track what goes to each job so your costs reflect actual consumption. This also catches waste or inventory shrinkage before it becomes a pattern you can’t explain.

What Goes Wrong

The most common problem is treating all materials as a general expense. You buy $15,000 in roofing supplies, expense it immediately, and have no idea how much actually went to each of the four jobs that month. One job might have consumed 60 percent of those materials while only generating 40 percent of revenue. Without job-level tracking, you never see it.

Weather delays create another issue. A job that should take three days stretches to five because of rain or an early snowstorm. Your labor costs just went up significantly but the bid price stayed the same. If you’re not tracking actual hours against estimates, you can’t adjust future bids to account for realistic timelines along the Wasatch Front.

Warranty Work Gets Buried

You finish a siding job in June. November brings a callback for a section that’s pulling away. The crew spends half a day fixing it. That labor should be tracked against the original job. Most contractors expense it as current labor, which distorts current job profitability while hiding the true cost of past work.

Change Orders Disappear

Weather damage during installation. Customer requests mid-project. Material upgrades the homeowner wants after seeing samples. These should all generate change orders with additional billing. Without proper tracking, extra work gets absorbed into the original bid and your margins erode job by job.

What Changes

You know which jobs made money and which ones didn’t. Not a rough guess based on the deposit and final payment, but actual profitability after materials, labor, equipment, and any callbacks. This lets you bid future work based on real historical data instead of gut feel and hope.

Cash flow becomes predictable even with seasonal swings. You see the pattern clearly and can plan for slower winter months. Your financials tell an accurate story about your business, which matters when you need a line of credit, want to bring on a partner, or decide whether to expand into commercial work.

Better Bids Based on Real Numbers

Historical job data shows your actual costs by project type and size. Residential re-roofs, commercial siding jobs, new construction window packages. You can bid with confidence because you know what similar jobs actually cost you in the past.

Seasonal Planning

Financial reports show monthly and quarterly trends clearly. You see the slow months coming and can plan accordingly. Whether that means building up cash reserves during busy season or lining up work that can happen in winter, you make decisions based on real numbers.

Utah's Construction Bookkeeping Specialists