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Home Depot · Job costs·Sunbelt Rentals · Equipment rental·Pella Windows · Materials·WIP retainage · Job 24-117·1099 vendor flagging on the fly
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Vertical preset · Construction & trades

Job costing without the spreadsheet.

QBO's job-cost UI was built for one company at a time. Yours has fourteen. Ledger collapses every contractor book into one keyboard inbox — and tags Home Depot, Sunbelt, Pella, Sysco to the right job the moment they hit.

14 design partners·183 contractor books on the platform·v0.4.2 · May '26
What's tuned for trades

Six things construction bookkeepers stop fighting.

The construction preset isn't a different product — it's a chart of accounts, a 142-vendor map, and a categorization model trained on a year of design-partner overrides.

/ 01

Job costs · materials vs labor

Every line gets routed to the right job from the QBO class list. Home Depot → Materials, Stoneway → Subcontractors, Sunbelt → Equipment rental — out of the box.

/ 02

1099 vendor flagging

Subcontractors that pass the $600/year threshold get auto-flagged in your firm's policy memory. Year-end W-9 chase gets prebuilt — not a January fire drill.

/ 03

WIP / retainage holdouts

Retainage holdouts on subcontractor pay-apps get flagged and routed to WIP — held instead of expensed. Releases trigger a journal-entry suggestion when the holdback ages out.

/ 04

Fuel & per-diem splits

Vehicle fuel routed to Vehicle expense · Job when the truck is on a job, Vehicle expense · Office otherwise. Per-diem cash splits go to the right job from a simple keystroke (/J 24-117).

/ 05

Multi-book vendor batch

Sunbelt hits half your contractor clients in the same week. Press B and apply the categorization to all of them. 3 seconds across 7 books vs 4 minutes in QBO.

/ 06

Lien waivers & pay-app receipts

Forward a pay-app receipt to receipts@ledgerinbox.com — we OCR the lien-waiver flag, route to WIP, and attach the doc to the QBO bill match.

"Job costing used to mean Wednesday nights with a spreadsheet open. Now I close twelve contractor books on Tuesday afternoon and I'm done by dinner."

Marcus Hayward·Hayward Trades Books · 14 contractor books·Design partner since Feb 2026
Median time to close · 14 books
4.2 hrs
−74% vs prior firm baseline
Suggestion acceptance, month 3
91 %
on construction-vertical books
1099 vendors flagged early
38
avg per design-partner firm · Jan 2026
Batch keystrokes per session
29
multi-client vendor categorize
What's in the preset

The construction chart of accounts.

Loaded automatically when you mark a book "construction" in onboarding. Override per-firm in Settings → Business type.

GroupAccountsCommon vendors auto-routed here
Job costs · MaterialsMaterials · Hardware, Lumber, ConcreteHome Depot · Lowe's · Menards · Fastenal · Pella · Andersen Windows · 84 Lumber
Job costs · SubcontractorsSubs — labor, Subs — materials & laborStoneway · Apex Electrical · Redline Plumbing · Trueline Framing
Job costs · Equipment rentalRental — short-term, Rental — long-termSunbelt Rentals · United Rentals · Herc · BigRentz
Vehicle & fuelVehicle fuel · job, Vehicle fuel · office, Vehicle R&MShell · BP · Costco Gas · Wex Fleet · Discount Tire
Permits & inspectionsPermits, Inspections, City feesCity of Chicago · IL Dept of Revenue · BuildingPermits.com
WIP & retainageWIP — held, WIP — released, Retainage receivableRouted by holdback flag in vendor payment memo
Insurance & bondsGL insurance, Bonds, Workers' compTravelers · Liberty Mutual · Hiscox · The Hartford
Office & adminOffice supplies, Software, Bank feesDefault fallback for non-construction-specific lines
Built with bookkeepers · not for them

Close Tuesday afternoon. Have Wednesday back.

Request access to the closed preview — preloaded with 8 contractor books, mid-month, exactly how your day actually looks. No card, no commitment.