Use one business credit card and one business bank account. Mixing personal and business transactions makes tracking impossible. Every business expense should flow through accounts you can reconcile in your accounting software.

Code every expense to a job when it happens, not later when you’re trying to remember. Buy materials at Home Depot for the Johnson kitchen? Code it to that job in QuickBooks immediately or at least same day. Wait two weeks and you’ll forget which job it was for or code it wrong.

Take photos of receipts with your phone and store them digitally. Apps like Dext or Hubdoc pull receipts directly into QuickBooks. Paper receipts fade, get lost, or sit in your truck until they’re illegible. Digital copies saved and organized by job are searchable and survive longer.

Track vehicle mileage if you’re claiming it as a deduction. Apps like MileIQ or TripLog run in the background and automatically log business trips. Recreating a year’s worth of mileage from memory doesn’t work and the IRS knows it. Track it as you go or don’t claim it.

Reconcile your accounts weekly, not monthly. Catch errors and duplicate charges while you remember what happened. Weekly reconciliation also helps you spot when a subcontractor got paid twice or when materials were delivered to the wrong job and coded incorrectly.

Use your accounting software’s job costing features. When you enter an expense, assign it to the project where it belongs. Don’t just categorize it as “materials” - assign it to “materials for Smith remodel.” That job-level detail is what lets you see profitability by project instead of just for the whole month.

Keep a folder or envelope in your truck for receipts that can’t be photographed immediately. Transfer them to digital storage or your bookkeeper weekly. Letting receipts pile up for months means you’ll lose some and forget context for others.

Separate personal purchases from business purchases even if you’re using the same card temporarily. Flag personal transactions so they get coded to owner’s draw, not business expenses. Mixing them creates problems at tax time when your accountant is trying to figure out which charges are legitimate deductions.

Track time if you’re billing hourly or need to know labor costs by job. Simple time tracking apps or even paper timesheets work as long as crew members record hours daily and assign them to the correct project. Guessing at time allocation after the fact gives you useless labor cost data.

The system doesn’t need to be complicated. It needs to be consistent. Track every expense as it happens, code it to the right job, save the receipt, and reconcile weekly. Do that and your books will actually show which projects made money.

Most contractors who complain about not knowing their real costs aren’t tracking expenses properly. You can’t manage what you don’t measure, and you can’t measure what you don’t track. Monthly bookkeeping only works if the underlying expense tracking is accurate.

If tracking feels overwhelming, that’s usually a sign you need help. Construction accounting requires discipline most contractors don’t have time for while running jobs. A bookkeeper who understands construction can set up systems that make tracking easier and catch errors you’d miss doing it yourself.