A first-person story about how we used to organize our QuickBooks file at Alpha Remodelers — project type × trade × scope, which ballooned into a chart of accounts three times the size it needed to be — and the trade-only structure we use now that MY LAURA handles the project tracking.
At Alpha Remodelers we used to organize our QuickBooks file three ways at once: by project type (Kitchen, Bathroom, Floor, Other), then by trade inside each project type, then sometimes by scope inside each trade. Each trade line lived three or four times — once under Kitchen, once under Bathroom, once under Floor, once under Other. The chart of accounts was roughly triple its current size.
It worked, technically. But I do the bookkeeping myself (no outside accountant), and every receipt meant picking the right project-type bucket and the right trade line inside that bucket. Miss once and the reports were off. Add a new project type and every trade line had to be duplicated all over again.
Then we built MY LAURA. Project tracking moved out of QuickBooks and into the software. The project-type layer disappeared from the chart of accounts. Each trade now exists exactly once, on the Sales side and again on the COGS side. Bookkeeping is dramatically faster, the reports are more accurate, and we don't lose anything useful — because MY LAURA answers the project-level questions now.
This guide shows the actual chart of accounts we use at Alpha today, organized by trade, and explains why the structure works when your project management software is doing its job.
When you run a remodeling business, the most important question is also the hardest to answer: did this job make money?
Most contractor software tells you what you billed and what you collected. Very few tell you what you actually spent on a specific job — materials, trade partners, labor — in a way that gives you a real net profit number per project. In the absence of software that does this, contractors fall back on QuickBooks. And the standard QuickBooks workaround is to organize the chart of accounts so that revenue and costs are tagged by project type, then broken down by trade inside each type.
That's what we did at Alpha for years. The structure looked roughly like this:
Every trade lived three or four times. The total line-item count was close to triple what we run today. When we wanted to know "are we making money on kitchens vs. bathrooms," we'd run a P&L grouped by project type and get a category-level answer.
I'm the bookkeeper at Alpha. I'm not an accountant. Five real pains in order of how much they hurt:
We didn't change it because bookkeeping was painful. We changed it because we built MY LAURA, and MY LAURA does the project tracking part better than QuickBooks ever could.
The architectural insight took us years to see clearly: QuickBooks is excellent at being a general ledger and a tax-prep system. It's mediocre at being a project management tool. When you force QuickBooks to track projects through chart-of-accounts gymnastics, you're using a hammer to drive screws. It works, but it's wasted effort.
The right architecture is two systems with clean responsibilities:
Once MY LAURA's project profitability report was live, we ran it side-by-side with QuickBooks for a stretch. The MY LAURA report was always more accurate, more current, and more useful for actual decisions than anything we could pull from QBO. It told us things QBO couldn't:
None of that fits in a chart of accounts. All of it lives in MY LAURA. So we collapsed the project-type layer out of QuickBooks.
Organized by trade. Each trade appears once on the Sales side and once on the COGS side. No project-type wrapper.
Plus standard operating-expense accounts (rent, insurance, vehicles, marketing, software, owner's comp, bank fees, taxes, etc.). The trade-level structure above is the part that used to be tripled and now isn't. Tile isn't a separate trade on our COA — it's billed and classified based on where it goes: Showers, Floors, or Backsplashes. Exterior work, landscaping, permits, and jobs we don't do land in Other.
We lost the ability to run a "P&L by project type" report inside QuickBooks. That used to feel like a safety blanket. I thought I needed it.
I didn't.
The thing that made that report feel valuable was answering "are kitchens or bathrooms more profitable." MY LAURA answers it better — by aggregating project profitability tagged with project type at the project level. We can still see kitchen vs. bathroom margins. We can also see them by client, by trade partner, by month, by season, and by individual job. The QuickBooks version was a single coarse slice. MY LAURA gives us every slice of the same data.
If your QuickBooks file currently duplicates every trade under Kitchen, Bathroom, Floor, Other — the way ours did — here's the migration. It takes about an evening and doesn't disrupt historical reporting.
Don't migrate piecemeal. Map out the new chart of accounts on paper before you touch QuickBooks. You can use our trade list above as a starting template — most remodelers can adopt it close to as-is, adjusting for which trades you actually do.
Two things to watch for:
In QuickBooks Online: Accounting → Chart of Accounts → New. Create each trade account once on the Sales side and once on the COGS side. Don't delete or merge anything yet.
QBO has a merge feature: rename an old account to match exactly the name of the account you want to merge it into, and QBO offers to merge them. Repeat for every duplicated trade across every project type.
For example, "Kitchen : Cabinets," "Bathroom : Cabinets," and "Other : Cabinets" all get merged into a single top-level "Cabinets" account. All historical transactions get reassigned, nothing is lost, and reports retroactively use the new structure.
This is the scary part. Take a backup first. If you've never merged accounts, test on a sandbox file before touching the live one.
If you're moving project tracking from QBO into MY LAURA at the same time, reconcile as you go. Every active project in MY LAURA should have the right billed amounts, PO totals, and trade partner payments. The first MY LAURA profitability report after migration becomes the new source of truth.
The new rule: every receipt gets classified by trade, not by project. Project assignment happens in MY LAURA via PO tagging. That habit shift is what delivers the time savings.
The most common pushback we get is that job costing is sacred and can't be given up. We agree. Job costing is sacred. That's exactly why we moved it out of QuickBooks.
Real job costing requires three things:
QuickBooks handles (1) reasonably well — invoices have customer fields. It struggles with (2) because most material purchases happen at suppliers who don't know which job the materials are for, so classification has to happen later by hand. It fails at (3) because QuickBooks reports run on close-of-period data, not live data.
MY LAURA handles all three natively. POs are tagged to projects at creation time. Trade partner payments link to project line items. Labor allocations come from scheduling. The profitability report is live — it updates the moment a PO is approved, not the moment a month closes.
Job costing is sacred. That's why it deserves a tool built for it, not a tool repurposed for it.
If you're using another contractor platform — Buildertrend, Jobber, Houzz Pro, CoConstruct — and that platform has a real project profitability feature you trust, the same logic applies. You don't need a project-type-wrapped COA in QuickBooks. Use the simpler trade-based structure and let your project software do the project tracking.
If your contractor software doesn't have real per-project profitability, then the QuickBooks workaround is probably the best you can do until you switch to a system that handles it properly. That's not us being coy about MY LAURA — it's the honest answer. The real constraint isn't QuickBooks. It's your project tracking system. Fix that first, then simplify your books.
Our old chart of accounts was three times its current size because we were trying to make QuickBooks do a job it wasn't built for. Our current COA is a clean trade-based list because we built MY LAURA to do that job in the right place.
If you're a remodeler currently maintaining a chart of accounts where every trade lives under every project type, I'd bet money you're spending hours every month on classification work that produces reports you don't fully trust. That's not your fault. It's the workaround everyone falls into when project tracking software fails them.
You deserve software that doesn't make you contort QuickBooks to answer basic questions about your own business. If MY LAURA isn't the right answer for you, that's fine — but don't let "I have to wrap my COA by project type" be a permanent fact of life. It's a workaround, and workarounds should always be temporary.
MY LAURA's project profitability report shows real-time net profit per job, with full drill-down to the line items behind every number. It's the report that let us shrink Alpha's QBO to a third of its old size.
See the Reports feature →