CPA for Contractors and Trades
Job costing, equipment planning, and multi-municipality payroll for Lehigh Valley builders.
Shetland Financial works with contractors, builders, and trade businesses across the Lehigh Valley and Upper Bucks: general contractors, electricians, plumbers, HVAC, excavation, and specialty trades. We are a fee-only CPA firm and registered investment advisor, so the business books and the owner’s own financial plan are handled by one team. You work directly with Kevin Dodgson, CPA, CFA, CFP®.
If you cannot see profit by job, you cannot manage it. Plenty of contractors know the business made money last year but could not tell you which jobs made it and which ones quietly lost it. Job costing that separates labor, materials, subs, and equipment per job is the difference between bidding on instinct and bidding on evidence. It is also what tells you which customers are worth keeping.
Long jobs raise a real accounting question. When a contract starts in one tax year and finishes in the next, there are different permitted methods for recognizing the income, and the choice affects when you pay tax. Smaller contractors have more flexibility here than larger ones. The right method depends on your size, your contract length, and how predictable your margins are.
Equipment is a planning decision. Trucks, excavators, trailers, and tooling can often be written off quickly, but writing everything off in your best year is not automatically the right move. If it wipes out income you would rather have taxed at a low rate, or costs you access to other planning, it was an expensive reflex. We plan purchases against the year you are actually having.
Payroll across municipalities is where Pennsylvania gets tedious. Crews live in different boroughs and townships and work in others, and Pennsylvania’s local Earned Income Tax and Local Services Tax rules follow both. Get it wrong and you collect notices from collectors across three counties. If you take work in New Jersey or New York, add reciprocity and registration to the list.
Worker classification and workers’ comp audits. Treating a regular crew member as a 1099 subcontractor is one of the more expensive mistakes in this industry, and the annual workers’ comp audit is often where it surfaces. Clean records of subcontractor certificates and properly classified crew make the audit uneventful.
Getting money out of the business. Contractors often build real equity in a company and no retirement savings outside it. That is a concentrated bet on one business, one industry, and one local economy. We look at how to move profit into diversified savings on a sensible schedule.
What you get
Job-level profitability you can bid from. Books structured so you can see margin by job, not just at year end.
Pennsylvania local payroll handled. Earned Income Tax and Local Services Tax across the municipalities your crew lives and works in.
Fee-only, flat-fee, no commissions. Clear pricing up front and no products being sold to you on the side.