A work-in-progress schedule your surety, your bank and your CPA will accept, prepared from the reports your QuickBooks already produces. You send us the reports. We send back the WIP schedule, the journal entries to post, and a plain-English read of what it says.
Monthly from $2,500. One-time from $6,500. Month to month, no annual contract.
Most contractors don't go looking for WIP preparation on a quiet afternoon. They go looking because:
If any of those is you, this page is for you. If you're still deciding whether you need one, start with Your WIP schedule is a diagnostic and come back.
Contractors between $5 million and $50 million in annual revenue who run their accounting in QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop or QuickBooks Enterprise, and who have fixed-price, GMP or unit-price contracts open at month end. General contractors, trade contractors, specialty subcontractors, civil and site contractors.
It is a good fit when you have a bookkeeper or office manager who keeps job costs in QuickBooks, but nobody in the building has prepared a WIP schedule before, or the last one was prepared by your CPA at year end and nobody looked at it again.
Not a fit: contractors whose work is almost entirely time-and-materials with no fixed-price contracts, contractors who also need someone to run the day-to-day books (that is our outsourced construction accounting service), and contractors on a platform that already produces a WIP schedule they trust.
Every WIP engagement, monthly or one-time, delivers the same four things.
Monthly WIP preparation, from $2,500 a month. We prepare the schedule every month, track estimates to complete month over month, give you the entries and the one-page read, and meet with you each month. Month to month, no annual contract. This is the version that catches profit fade while there's still time to do something about it, and it's the version your surety would rather see.
One-time WIP preparation, from $6,500. One schedule as of one date, usually a year end or a quarter end, with the entries and the call. Built for the contractor who needs a schedule for the CPA, the bank or the bond agent and doesn't have one. A one-time schedule is a snapshot. It tells you where you stand; it can't tell you which way you're moving.
Most one-time clients come back for the monthly service once they've seen what the schedule shows them. If you think that's where you'll end up, start monthly and skip the higher one-time fee.
We quote a fixed fee before we start, so there are no hourly surprises. Three things set it.
How many jobs had activity this year. A schedule with 12 open jobs is a different job than one with 60.
Whether a prior year-end WIP schedule exists. This is the big one. To tie this year's WIP to your P&L, we need last year's ending position: the over- and under-billings that were on the books at the prior year end. If a prior year-end schedule exists, we start from it. If it doesn't, we build it first, and that is most of the extra cost on a first engagement.
How disciplined your job costing has been. Percent complete is cost to date divided by the estimate, so any cost that was never part of the estimate throws off every number that follows. If administrative and office expenses, meals, or general overhead have been coded to jobs, they have to be found and moved off before the cost-to-date numbers mean anything. The cleaner the job costing, the lower the fee.
We'll tell you which of these applies to you on the first call, and you'll have a number before you decide.
QuickBooks doesn't produce a WIP schedule. Not Online, not Desktop, not Enterprise. It tracks costs by job and billings by customer, and it can show you job profitability, but it has no idea what percent complete a job is, what you've earned versus what you've billed, or what entries to book. That's why the QuickBooks community forums are full of contractors asking how to do WIP, and why the answers all end with "export to Excel."
That export is exactly where we start. We work from the reports your QuickBooks already runs:
Plus two things QuickBooks can't give us: your contract values with approved change orders, and your project managers' estimates of cost to complete.
You run the reports, drop them in a shared folder, and we take it from there. We never need a login to your file, and you never pay for another user seat. If you'd rather we pull the reports ourselves, we can do that too, but most clients prefer to keep it this way.
If you're on Sage 50, Xero or something else, ask. The process is the same; we've just built our templates and our report list around QuickBooks because that's what most contractors who need this service are running.
Every WIP schedule rests on one number per job: the estimated cost to complete. QuickBooks doesn't have it. Your bookkeeper doesn't have it. Your project managers have it, and most of them have never been asked for it in a way they could answer.
So we ask for it in a way they can answer. You get a one-page estimate-to-complete form per job and a short explanation of why the number matters to the company. We don't take the numbers as given. When an estimate hasn't moved in three months while costs kept climbing, or a job shows 95 percent complete with a third of the budget unspent, we flag it and ask. On monthly engagements we have the history to see those patterns; on a one-time engagement we have less context, so we lean harder on the questions.
That is the difference between a WIP schedule that gets accepted and one that gets picked apart. A surety underwriter or a CPA reads a WIP schedule the way a mechanic listens to an engine. The numbers that don't fit are the ones they ask about, and we'd rather you hear the question from us first.
Your schedule is prepared by a team that has prepared hundreds of WIP schedules for contractors over many years, led by Bryce Wisan, CPA, CCIFP. Before founding Levvigo, Bryce spent more than 15 years in construction accounting, including as a construction-only audit partner at a national CPA firm, where he examined contractor WIP schedules on behalf of the sureties, banks and owners who relied on them. He knows what gets a schedule accepted and what gets it sent back.
We do this for contractors across the United States. Everything happens over shared folders and video calls, so where you are doesn't matter.
Sometimes the first WIP schedule is the first time an owner sees that job costing is unreliable, that change orders aren't being tracked, or that the PMs and the office are working from different numbers. The schedule can't fix that; a process can.
If that's what the schedule shows, we can help you put the processes in place: how costs get coded, how change orders get approved and billed, how estimates to complete get updated each month. That's our business operations consulting service, and plenty of WIP clients add it after the second or third month.
And if what you really need is someone to run the whole accounting function, WIP included, that's outsourced construction accounting. If you have a bookkeeper and need a controller over them, that's our construction controller services.
Book a 30-minute call. Tell us how many jobs you have open, what system you're on, and whether you've ever had a WIP schedule prepared. We'll tell you what it would cost, monthly or one-time, before you commit to anything.
Bryce Wisan, CPA, CCIFP. Construction accounting only. Contractors $5M to $50M.
A WIP (work-in-progress) schedule lists every open contract and compares what you've earned on it, based on percent complete, with what you've billed. The difference is an over-billing or an under-billing, and both change your real profit and your real cash position. Sureties want it because it's the only report that shows whether your jobs are actually making the margin you bid, and whether you've been living on other people's deposits.
No. QuickBooks Online, Desktop and Enterprise track job costs and billings, but none of them calculate percent complete, earned revenue or over- and under-billings, and none of them produce the journal entries. A WIP schedule is built outside QuickBooks from the reports it produces, which is what we do.
For QuickBooks Online: Profit & Loss by Customer, plus an invoice list by customer. For Desktop and Enterprise: Profit & Loss by Job, plus the invoice list by Customer:Job. We'll send you the exact list with run instructions after the first call.
No. You run the reports and share them with us. No login, no extra user seat, no software. If you'd prefer we pull the reports ourselves, we can, but it isn't required.
Monthly service starts at $2,500 a month, month to month with no annual contract. A one-time schedule starts at $6,500. The fee is fixed and quoted before we start. It goes up with the number of jobs that had activity during the year, with how much cleanup your job costing needs, and, most of all, if no prior year-end WIP schedule exists and we have to build one.
To tie this year's WIP to your income statement, we have to know the over- and under-billings that were on the books at the prior year end. Without a prior year-end schedule, there's no starting point, so we build one first. That's the single biggest driver of cost on a first engagement.
As little as one week from the day we have complete reports and estimates to complete. The schedule is usually waiting on your project managers' estimates, not on us. First engagements take longer than the months that follow.
We start with a call to learn how many jobs you have open, how your job costing is set up, and what date the schedule needs to be as of. Then we send the report list and the estimate-to-complete form. The first schedule includes building the prior year-end position if there isn't one.
Usually, yes. Part of preparing the first schedule is finding costs that were coded to the wrong job or shouldn't be on a job at all, and reversing them. That cleanup is priced into the first engagement. If the job costing is unreliable enough that the schedule can't be trusted, we'll tell you that before we start, and we'll tell you what it would take to fix it.
Your project managers. It is the one number nobody else can supply. We give you a one-page form per job and a short explanation for your PMs, and we flag the estimates that don't make sense against the costs to date.
We give you the entries written out, account by account, and your bookkeeper posts them in a few minutes. If you'd rather hand off the books entirely, that's our outsourced construction accounting service.
A WIP schedule needs costs incurred, not just costs paid, so we'll need unpaid vendor bills and subcontractor pay apps recorded as of the schedule date. Most cash-basis contractors can get there with an accounts payable accrual at month end. We'll walk you through it on the first call.
Yes. The monthly call is partly to get you ready for those conversations, and we'll join the call with your CPA or bond agent if you want us there. We prepare the schedule; your CPA still does the review or audit.
QuickBooks Online, Desktop and Enterprise are our focus, because that's what most contractors who need this service are running. If you're on something else, ask; the process is the same.