Finance
Know the number, on Tuesday.
Not at quarter-close. Not when the accountant reconciles. Not when a trade partner tells you he didn't get paid the right amount. On Tuesday, while there's still a job to do something about.
Know the number, on Tuesday.
Not at quarter-close. Not when the accountant reconciles. Not when a trade partner tells you he didn't get paid the right amount. On Tuesday, while there's still a job to do something about.
QuickBooks knows what you invoiced. It doesn't know what the estimate said. The spreadsheet knows what the job cost — until you forget to update it, or until the numbers stop matching what actually happened.
Margin you should have found in month two shows up in month three. Work you built gets billed short because nobody caught it against the estimate. A sub gets paid off memory instead of the record. The current way isn't wrong. It's late.
None of them happen because you're careless. All of them happen because the numbers live in different places.
You knew the job was tight. You didn't know it was that tight. By the time the accountant reconciled, the margin was what it was — and it was already spent on the next project's deposit.
He invoiced you for a bathroom. You paid it. A month later he sent an itemized statement that included a bathroom he'd already been paid for. Once caught, always awkward. The record has to match the paper, not the memory.
Sent, received, sitting somewhere on the client's desk. You don't know she never opened it. The AR ages quietly and by month two you're chasing money that would have been a phone call in week one.
The categories are close but not clean. Some line items are in the wrong bucket. The trade partner spend is grouped by check number instead of by job. Reconciliation takes her four hours it shouldn't.
Not one job, in all the years we've run Alpha. That isn't because the software caught something. It's because I'm precise to the point of slow. We don't guess at what work is going to cost us, and I go back through every job myself before I call it closed.
Twice that wasn't enough. Once I missed a cell in a formula and underpaid a trade partner — he had to come tell me, which is not a conversation I want to have again. Another time, tracking a large job across multiple estimates and multiple spreadsheet tabs, I overpaid one. I caught that one myself in the final evaluation and we took it off the next project. Nobody lost money either time. But both times, the only thing standing between an error and a real problem was me, personally, going back through it.
That's what the finance side of MY LAURA is for. Not because contractors are careless — the good ones are every bit as careful as I am. Because being the only safeguard your business has isn't a system. It's a person. And people miss cells.
Signed change orders. Overdue draws. Drafts nobody sent. Fixable while it's still fixable.
Go to Billing HealthProject profitability, AR aging, AP by trade partner, lead conversion. Clean categories, real numbers.
Go to ReportsWhatever plan you're on. Whatever's in there already. The books stay honest as you go.
Go to QuickBooks SyncWe started on Joist, which did estimates and invoices and nothing else. When we needed scheduling we moved to Jobber. Jobber stopped fitting, so we went to Houzz Pro — where the change orders were complicated, the reports came out wrong, and the schedule wouldn't sync to our iPhone calendars. So I added another application on top of it.
For three months I bandaided software together. Somewhere in there, other contractors started telling us they had exactly the same problem.
The finance side is the piece that keeps drifting when the work lives in three tools. Change orders in one, invoices in another, POs on paper. The reason the numbers reconcile here is simple: write the estimate once, and the schedule, the materials, the POs, and the invoices all pull from it. Nothing to move between systems. Competitors whose estimating and scheduling are separate modules structurally can't say that.
Every piece above is in every MY LAURA account on day one. Not a Pro tier. Not an add-on. Not metered by project count.
Unlimited projects. Unlimited team. Unlimited trade partners. One price.
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