General Contractor Chart of Accounts: Free CSV Template

General contractor books fail in a way the P&L hides. The default small-business chart of accounts assumes you earn revenue when you invoice it. A contractor bills on a schedule of values, gets paid less retainage, and does the work on a different timeline from both. Book revenue the day the pay application goes out and your P&L reports your billing pattern, not your business. A month where you front-loaded a draw looks like a great month. The month you finish the job looks like a loss.

This is a working chart of accounts for a general contractor or remodeler, account by account, with the reason each one exists.

Free download: General contractor chart of accounts template (CSV), the structure in this guide as 64 numbered accounts with types, subtypes, and a one-line note on why each exists. Imports into QuickBooks Online, Xero, and most accounting software. No email required.

Why the default template fails general contractors

Four things are true of contracting that are not true of a generic service business.

Billing and earning come apart. Progress billing, front-loaded draws, and deposits mean what you invoiced this month is rarely what you earned this month. The accounts that close that gap, overbillings and underbillings, do not exist in the default template.

Money is held back in both directions. The owner holds retainage from you, and you hold it from your subs. Mixed into regular receivables and payables, it makes your A/R aging look worse than it is and your cash position look better.

Most of the cost is someone else's invoice. Subcontractors are usually the largest cost on the job, and their bills often arrive weeks after the work. If a sub's work is in place at month end but the bill is not in, the job looks more profitable than it is until the bill shows up.

Change orders are where margin moves. Blend them into contract revenue and you cannot see whether your change orders make money or whether you are giving work away to keep the owner happy.

Income accounts

Split by the kind of work only as far as it changes the margin. A remodeler who does no commercial work does not need a commercial line. The split that matters for everyone is change order revenue, because it is the one that tells you whether scope changes are priced or absorbed.

Cost of goods sold

COGS is for costs that exist because a specific job exists.

Two of these change your margins the moment you add them. Labor burden in operating expenses means every job is costed at raw wages, which understates field labor by a fifth or more. And dumpsters and site overhead are real per-job costs that most contractors bury in general expenses, which inflates every job's margin by the same amount.

Phases belong in cost codes, not accounts. Framing, rough-in, drywall, and finish are how you estimate and how you manage a job, but they are not separate accounts. Track them with cost codes, classes, or project tracking in your accounting software. The chart stays readable, and each cost still lands on the right job and phase.

Balance sheet accounts contractors are missing

Overbillings and underbillings come from a WIP schedule. For each open job it compares the costs to date against the total estimated cost to get a percent complete, applies that percent to the contract price to get earned revenue, and compares earned revenue to what you have billed. The difference goes to one of the two accounts with a monthly journal entry. Many small contractors never do this and it shows. A shop that is consistently overbilled is spending cash that belongs to work it has not done yet, and nothing on the default P&L tells them.

Accrued job costs is the account that makes the WIP schedule honest. If the drywall sub finished on the 28th and bills on the 10th, that cost belongs to this month. Without the accrual, percent complete is understated, and so is the cost on a job you may already be losing money on.

For taxes, most smaller contractors under the IRS gross-receipts threshold can use simpler methods than percentage of completion. The books a bank or bonding company wants to see are a separate question from the return, so ask your CPA which method each one needs.

Operating expenses

Standard, with three contractor-specific splits. Keep project manager and estimator salaries apart from office salaries, so you can see what it costs to win and run a job. Some contractors cost project managers to jobs; either is defensible as long as you pick one and stay with it. Keep general liability insurance on its own line, because it is often rated on payroll or revenue and changes with volume. And keep interest on the line of credit apart from bank fees, because contractors lean on credit lines between draws and the cost is worth watching.

Setting it up without breaking your history

1. Change at a period boundary, the start of a quarter or year.
2. Rename before you create. If "Sales" becomes "Contract revenue, residential remodel," renaming keeps the history. Creating a new account splits it.
3. Merge rather than delete. Deleting an account with transactions either fails or orphans data.
4. Map old to new in writing before you touch anything, so you can restate the prior year.
5. Set up cost codes before the first job. Retrofitting phases onto jobs already in progress is where most setups go wrong.

And if you use bank rules to keep the new accounts filled, write them narrowly and check quarterly what they actually caught. A rule that files every lumber yard charge to materials will file the dumpster rental there too. What that costs is a post of its own.

What good looks like

Once the structure is right, your books answer these without a spreadsheet:

• What was gross margin last month on the work actually done, not the invoices sent?
• Are we overbilled or underbilled in total, and on which jobs?
• How much retainage is owed to us, and how much do we owe our subs?
• Do our change orders make money?
• What does field labor really cost per hour once burden is included?

If your books cannot answer those, the chart of accounts is the problem, not the bookkeeper. Once they can, the next step is a monthly WIP schedule, so the answers exist for each job and not just the company.

The general contractor chart of accounts template (CSV) has all 64 accounts numbered and ready to import. For the specialty trades, see the roofing, electrical, plumbing, and HVAC versions.

*Written by Austin Semple, a former controller: three years in audit, seven running the books for small businesses, and the founder of Poof. Poof holds deposits as a liability and releases them on completion, tracks profit per job from the bills and invoices tagged to it, and closes the books within five business days or the next month is free. Start a 30-day trial, no card required.*