In the ever-evolving world of construction, managing finances is as crucial as managing timelines and projects. For construction firms, accounting is more than keeping track of expenses and revenues — it involves managing project budgets, tracking labor costs, and staying compliant with industry regulations. For this reason, having the right accounting software tailored for construction businesses can pave the way for streamlined operations and increase profitability.
Why Choose Accounting Software for Construction?
At its core, construction accounting is unique. Unlike other businesses, construction companies deal with multiple projects, fluctuating costs, and a myriad of regulatory requirements. As such, accounting software designed specifically for the construction industry addresses these unique needs by providing features that standard accounting software might lack. Some of these key benefits include:
Payroll Management: Managing payroll for a construction business can be complex as it factors in various wage rates, union rules, and compliance requirements. Robust accounting software can simplify this process, ensuring timely and accurate payroll processing.
Job Costing: Construction-specific software offers tools for job costing that enable finance teams to allocate expenses to specific projects and track profitability accurately.
Progress Billing: Specialized or industry-specific software helps in managing progress billing and allows for accurate invoice generation (based on the work completed).
Compliance and Reporting: Construction accounting software typically includes reporting capabilities that help ensure compliance with tax laws and financial reporting standards.
Key Features to Look for in Accounting Software
With the end goal of optimizing accounting practices, it’s critical to identify of short list of “must have” features, including:
Project Management Integration: Software that integrates seamlessly with your project management tools for real-time data on labor and materials will deliver optimal results.
Custom Reporting Tools: The ability to generate customizable reports often provide users with insights into project efficiency, cash flow, and profitability, ultimately helping them make sound, data-driven decisions.
Mobile Functionality: This fosters office-to-field communication and collaboration and provides remote workers with access to information and data in real-time.
User-Friendly Interface: The solution should be easy to navigate and usable by your finance team.
CMiC Accounting: Designed for Construction
Built on a Single Database PlatformTM, CMiC Accounting is the foundation of our complete construction management ERP which designed to support the unique accounting requirements of construction and capital projects firms. It offers the capabilities contractors need to manage jobs effectively with construction-specific accounting functionality and workflows.
CMiC Accounting goes well beyond just helping you manage financial transactions – it is architected to flow everything into both your General Ledger and your job costing simultaneously – ensuring that no double or manual entries are required in the job journal. With fully built-in job costing, accounting teams can easily track financial transactions and data within each job and project they manage.
Key Features:
Accounts Payable:
Track invoices and access online historical information by company and across companies.
Create accounts payable aging reports to list the amounts due to vendors and subcontractors.
Accounts Receivable:
Capture project-related billing automatically, generate non-project related or ad-hoc invoicing and view all open receivables including retainage.
Automate customer invoicing and payment collection.
Set and track credit limit and credit terms for all customers.
Access total billing history by customer or by project and past due invoices (including aging accounts receivable report to track monies owed).
General Ledger:
Generate financial statements, cash flow analyses and custom reports from this central storehouse of your company’s financial data.
Publish both standard and custom financial reports.
Maintain accuracy and integrity of financial transaction data to ensure compliance for auditing and regulatory requirements.
Cash Management:
Maintain all your cash assets effectively.
Manage day-to-day cash transactions, cash balances and multiple bank or credit card accounts.
Receive automatic transaction updates to the General Ledger.
Cost Management:
Capture labor, materials and equipment costs in one place and easily issue subcontracts.
Assign project costs to a specific job and track those costs throughout the project timeline.
Stay up to date with job status to keep projects on track with job reports.
Analyze costs and revenue at any point of the project lifecycle.
Financial Management:
Generate the WIP Report to determine if active jobs are being overbilled or underbilled.
Compare costs-to-date (actuals) with budget (estimates) to know the health of jobs by monitoring cost and billing issues.
Close out the month-end and year-end with simplified tools and processes.
Optimize credit risk by allocating revenue accounts across companies.
Ensure that field and accounting teams are working from the same set of financial data towards a common goal.
Leverage automated approval workflows, auto routing and easy storage and retrieval.
Digitally manage documents, including invoices, contracts and change orders.
Companies with multiple business entities can automate and manage inter-company transfers.
Financial Reporting:
Deploy an enterprise-wide single pane to enter and extract financial data.
Drill down into current and historical financial data to gain key insights with CMiC Analytics.
Accurately track performance of revenues to costs (budgeting and revenue forecasting).
Prepare consolidated reports, including multiple company consolidation.
Business Benefits
Whether you are an owner, a general contractor or a specialty contractor, the business benefits of a truly integrated job cost accounting application are many – enabling you to track key performance measures, such as cash flow and profitability analyses, estimates versus actuals, WIP, earned value and aging reports by project or job. In addition, it gives you total control over all aspects of payroll and asset management, which improves accountability across the organization.
CMiC Accounting goes well beyond basic bookkeeping tools. It delivers construction-specific accounting capabilities in one place – a single source of truth that ensures data integrity across the enterprise. By centralizing financial data, finance professionals can eliminate duplicative data entry, minimize errors, reduce risk, improve collaboration, enable managers to make informed decisions and boost the bottom line.
Operate With Total Visibility and Make Data-Driven Decisions
With CMiC Accounting, construction firms can unify enterprise-wide data, automate processes, improve job costing and make better decisions based on accurate reporting. Through our all-in-one software, businesses can manage financials for all areas of their company by unifying essential functions in one place – with financials at the very core – and deliver to company executives an accurate and complete picture of their enterprise.
Put the Systems in Place to Prepare for Your Firm for Future Growth
CMiC Accounting allows you to expand your business locally and internationally with multi-currency and multi-company capabilities. With flexible licensing, users can be added easily to the platform to respond to business needs and to scale up quickly. Companies can take advantage of inter-company accounting to track financials and produce reports for related entities across the entire organization.