The answer is job costing. Each job site becomes its own profit center in your books. Every dollar of revenue and every dollar of expense gets assigned to the specific project it belongs to.

Without this structure, you end up with one big pile of income and expenses at year end. You might know the company made money overall, but you have no idea which jobs were profitable and which ones quietly ate your margins. When you’re running four or five sites at once, you need to see each one clearly.

In your accounting software, set up each job site as a separate customer or project. Material purchases, labor hours, equipment rentals, and subcontractor payments all get coded to the right job. Revenue gets recorded the same way through progress billing or final invoices. When you pull a report for any job, you see everything related to that job and nothing else.

The challenging part is getting clean data from the field. Your crew needs to write the job number on every receipt before it ends up crumpled in someone’s truck. Time sheets need to specify which project each person worked on and for how long. Subcontractor invoices need to reference the job they were working. If this information doesn’t come in organized, someone has to sort it out later or it gets recorded wrong.

Keep the system simple for your people. Pre-printed job numbers, a consistent format for time tracking, purchase orders that tie to specific projects. The goal is making it easy for workers on site to give you what you need without slowing down their actual work.

Some costs don’t belong to any single job. Your truck, general liability insurance, office expenses, and your own salary benefit all your projects. These indirect costs get tracked separately and allocated across jobs based on a consistent method like percentage of direct costs or labor hours. Construction job costing includes figuring out how to handle overhead so your job profitability reports reflect reality.

When this is set up correctly, you can pull a report any time and see exactly where each project stands against budget. You catch problems before the job is finished instead of after. You learn which types of work actually make you money and which ones you should price differently or stop bidding entirely.

If you’re running multiple jobs along the Wasatch Front and can’t see profitability by project, the problem is usually how your books are structured. Most contractors who set up QuickBooks themselves end up with a system that tracks overall numbers but misses job-level detail entirely. Bookkeeping services in American Fork that understand construction can get this right from the start or fix what’s not working now.