Job costing, percentage-of-completion, WIP schedules, retention tracking, and multi-entity real estate structures — accounting that holds up for your banker, your bonding company, your partners, and the buyer you'll eventually sell to. For general contractors, subcontractors, real estate investors, and property management companies across the Houston Metroplex.
Residential, commercial, and industrial GCs running multiple active projects. Job costing across 5 to 50 simultaneous jobs, subcontractor management, retention tracking, percentage-of-completion accounting, and the bonding-company financial package every serious GC eventually needs.
Electrical, mechanical, plumbing, framing, drywall, roofing, concrete, and other specialty trades working as subs on GC projects. Different challenges than GCs — managing receivables from multiple GCs, retention you can't control, materials and equipment costs, and crews paid weekly while GCs pay net-30 at best.
Investors holding 3 to 50+ rental properties, fix-and-flip operators, syndicators, and developers. Almost always multi-entity (one LLC per property is the norm), with property-level P&Ls, depreciation schedules, partnership distributions, and the records every buyer and lender will want to see.
Property management companies face two accounting challenges: running their own business AND producing owner statements for the properties they manage. We handle either side or both — including white-label owner statements you can present to your property owners as if they came from your firm.
Six active projects. Costs piling up across all of them. Revenue recognized when invoices go out instead of when work happens. The P&L lies until each project finishes — and by then you can't fix what went wrong.
Hundreds of thousands in retention receivable sitting on the balance sheet. Subs asking when they'll get paid. GCs claiming they haven't released yours. Nobody can produce a clean retention aging report when you actually need one.
You bought properties one at a time, opened an LLC for each, and never set up real entity-level books. Now every entity needs its own tax return and nobody can produce a property-level P&L that ties to anything.
If you're running long-term construction contracts and your books recognize revenue when you send an invoice, your financials are lying to you. Not in a way that breaks any laws today, but in a way that hides real profit problems from you until they're too big to fix — and in a way that creates serious problems when a bank, bonding company, auditor, or buyer looks at your numbers.
Percentage-of-completion (POC) accounting is the GAAP-prescribed method for recognizing revenue on long-term contracts. Instead of recognizing revenue when invoices are sent or cash is received, POC recognizes revenue based on the percentage of the project that's actually been completed.
The math is straightforward. At any point in time:
Compared with what you've actually billed, you end up with one of two situations: under-billings (you've earned more than you've billed — a current asset) or over-billings (you've billed more than you've earned — a current liability). Every contractor's balance sheet should show these. Most don't.
POC and WIP aren't just GAAP boxes to check. They're the operational tools that tell you whether your projects are actually profitable in real time:
General contractors face a specific set of accounting challenges that go beyond what general bookkeepers understand. Multiple simultaneous projects, each with its own budget, schedule, subcontractor mix, retention schedule, and progress billing cycle. Cost codes mapping to specific construction divisions. Change orders that may or may not be in the books yet. Subcontractor compliance documentation that needs to tie to the accounts payable. Bonding company requirements that drive the way the balance sheet has to look.
General contractors operate on a cash flow pattern that breaks most accountants. You pay subs and suppliers on terms that are roughly 30 days. You bill the owner once a month via pay application. The owner reviews, the architect certifies, and 30-45 days later you get paid — minus retention. Meanwhile, payroll runs every Friday and material deliveries don't wait.
Done right, the accounting supports this rhythm:
The most common WIP discovery on GC engagements we take over: a project the owner thought was making money was actually breaking even — but because revenue recognition was wrong, it appeared profitable. Meanwhile, the project was over-billed by hundreds of thousands, meaning the contractor was funding other work with money he hadn't actually earned yet. When that project finishes, the "profit" disappears and the working capital hole becomes visible. Real WIP would have shown this in real time.
Subcontractors and specialty trade contractors live in a different financial world from general contractors. You're not the prime contractor on the project — you're working for someone who is. Your AR is at the mercy of GCs who may pay you on time, may not, and may withhold retention until the project ends six months from now. Your crews are paid weekly. Your material suppliers want their money in 30 days. The gap between cash out and cash in is the central financial fact of the business.
Texas mechanic's lien law is one of the most subcontractor-friendly in the country — but only if you protect your rights at every step. The accounting plays a real role:
We don't file liens — that's your attorney's job. What we do is keep records in a state where if you need to file one, your attorney has the source documentation organized and accessible immediately. Most subs only discover their records aren't lien-ready after a payment dispute starts, at which point they're scrambling.
Real estate investing in Texas almost always becomes a multi-entity exercise. You start with one property, often in your personal name. You buy a second and form your first LLC. By the time you own five or ten properties, you have a stack of LLCs, possibly a holding entity, sometimes a separate management LLC, and you're probably running personal expenses through the wrong accounts. The accounting was never set up to scale, and now it's a mess.
The investors we work with typically fall into one of three patterns:
Fix-and-flip operators face a unique accounting question: is each flip a separate inventory item or a separate project? The answer affects how revenue, costs, and profit show up on your books and tax return. Most flip operators have their books set up wrong — typically with renovation costs expensed as incurred rather than capitalized into the property's basis, which produces wildly distorted monthly P&Ls.
Done right, each flip property is tracked as inventory or work-in-progress. Acquisition price, renovation costs, holding costs (interest, insurance, utilities, taxes), and selling costs all capitalize into the property's basis. Revenue and the gain on sale recognize when the property closes. This produces predictable, monthly profit visibility — and dramatically cleaner books for tax purposes.
Real engagement we took over recently: an investor with 12 rental properties had been running everything through a single QuickBooks file with no class tracking by property. Personal expenses commingled. Some properties in his name, some in LLCs, some in his spouse's name. We spent 60 days rebuilding entity-level and property-level books. The cleanup revealed properties he didn't know were unprofitable, depreciation deductions he was missing, and personal expenses that had been quietly inflating his tax liability for years.
Property management companies have a uniquely complicated accounting challenge: they have to maintain their own business accounting (the management fee revenue, staff payroll, operating expenses, office overhead) AND produce accurate, transparent monthly statements for every property owner whose properties they manage. Two completely different accounting workflows, often running through the same property management software, often confused with each other when the bookkeeper isn't a specialist.
Same as any service business: management fee revenue recognized as services are delivered, staff payroll, leasing commissions, technology and software costs, marketing, and the operating expenses to run the management business itself. The challenge isn't the accounting complexity — it's keeping your firm's books separate from the trust-account-style activity that flows through your firm on behalf of owners.
This is where property management accounting gets specialized. Money belonging to property owners — rent collected, security deposits held, vendor payments made on their behalf — must be:
For our property management clients, we can take this work entirely off your plate. White-label owner statements that look like they came from your firm. Per-owner reporting that scales with your portfolio. Reconciliation discipline that protects your firm from the kind of mistakes that create owner disputes and TREC complaints.
Property management companies that also manage HOAs face the additional layer of Texas Property Code Chapter 209 compliance for the associations under management. We have a dedicated HOA accounting practice for property management firms running HOA portfolios — including per-association accounting, board-ready financials, reserve fund management, and the specific compliance requirements Texas HOAs face.
30-minute discovery call. Bring us your last three months of financials, your entity list, and your software access. We'll tell you where the books are leaving money on the table — and whether we're the right team to fix it.
Book a Discovery Call →Whether you're running a 20-project GC operation, a 30-property rental portfolio, or a property management firm with 150 doors under management, every engagement includes the monthly foundation — plus the construction- or real estate-specific deliverables your business actually needs.
For contractors — every job's revenue, direct costs, and margin, with cost code detail and project-by-project rollups.
Percentage-of-completion calculations, earned-to-date vs. billed-to-date, over/under-billings — the schedule your bonding company expects.
Retention receivable and payable, by project and party, with expected release dates and aging detail.
For investors — every property tracked as its own profit center with income, expenses, capital improvements, and net operating income.
Each LLC runs clean books with intercompany activity properly recorded. Portfolio-level consolidations produced on demand for lenders or partners.
White-label monthly statements for property management firms to present to property owners. Per-owner accounting, reconciled monthly.
Book and tax depreciation schedules per property or asset. Capital improvements properly capitalized. Tax CPA gets clean year-end data.
Quarterly or monthly conversations about project mix, portfolio health, banking strategy, and the financial direction of the business.
Texas sales tax law treats construction contracts in two very different ways, and the choice between them has significant cash, tax, and audit implications. Most contractors don't know which type they're operating under, and many are operating inconsistently — taxing some projects one way and other projects another way without realizing it.
Under Texas law, a construction contract is either:
The choice between these two structures isn't arbitrary — it has real cash flow and tax implications, and inconsistency between projects can create sales tax audit exposure that's expensive to fix. We help contractor clients make the strategic choice for their business, document it clearly, and operate consistently.
Sales tax exemption for tax-exempt entity projects works differently — contractors need to maintain valid exemption certificates from the project owner, and the documentation around exempt material purchases needs to be airtight. Audit exposure for missing exemption documentation is real. We maintain the documentation, file the right forms, and protect contractors against the most common tax exemption mistakes.
Yes. Job costing is the foundation of construction accounting and one of our core deliverables for every construction client. We track revenue and direct costs (labor, materials, subcontractors, equipment) at the job level, allocate overhead appropriately, and produce job profitability reports that tell you which projects make money and which don't. For general contractors managing 5 to 50 active jobs, this is the single most valuable accounting practice we set up.
Percentage-of-completion (POC) is a revenue recognition method that recognizes revenue based on the proportion of a long-term contract that's been completed, rather than waiting until the project finishes. Under GAAP and tax rules, most construction contractors with contracts spanning more than one fiscal year are required to use POC for projects above certain thresholds. POC accounting requires careful tracking of estimated total cost, costs incurred to date, and percent complete — and produces the over/under billings calculations that show up on every contractor's balance sheet.
Retention (also called retainage) is the portion of contract payments — typically 5-10% — held back by the project owner or general contractor until the project is substantially complete. From an accounting perspective, retention receivable must be tracked separately from regular AR because it's not collectible on normal terms. Retention payable (what you owe subcontractors) similarly needs separate tracking. We maintain detailed retention schedules so you always know what's owed to you, what you owe to subs, and when it should be released.
Yes. Real estate investing almost always involves multi-entity structures — a separate LLC for each property, a holding LLC, sometimes a management LLC, and personal accounts in the mix. We run consolidated bookkeeping across multi-entity real estate structures, properly track intercompany activity, allocate management fees and overhead, and produce both property-level and portfolio-level financials. This matters enormously for lender packages, partnership tax returns, and eventual property sales.
Yes — for both their own internal accounting and for the property accounting they manage for owners. Property management companies face two distinct accounting challenges: running their own business (the management fee revenue, staff payroll, operating expenses) and producing owner statements for the properties under management (rental income, vendor expenses, security deposits, owner draws). We handle either side or both, including white-label owner statements you can present to your property owners as if they came from your firm.
No — we don't perform audits or other CPA attestation services. What we do is keep your books in a state where audits are inexpensive and quick. When your bonding company, lender, or owner requires an audited financial statement, we prepare the working papers and supporting schedules your auditor needs and coordinate directly with them through fieldwork.
Monthly engagements for construction businesses at Anchor Point typically range from $3,000 to $8,000 depending on number of active jobs, transaction volume, multi-entity structure, and how much CFO-level guidance is involved. Smaller contractors with 5-10 active jobs typically land at the lower end. Larger general contractors with 20+ active jobs, complex retention schedules, or bonding requirements run higher. Real estate investors with multi-property, multi-entity structures range from $4,000 to $10,000+. All engagements are fixed-fee with no hourly billing.
Whether you're running 15 active construction projects, managing a 40-property rental portfolio, or growing a property management firm — 30 minutes with us will tell you what your books should be showing you and aren't.