QuickBooks Online Setup for Maine Contractors and Trades Businesses
QuickBooks Online Setup for Maine Contractors and Trades Businesses
If you're a Maine contractor running your business finances out of a spreadsheet, a shoebox of receipts, or a combination of both — you're making your financial life harder than it needs to be.
QuickBooks Online is the bookkeeping tool built for businesses exactly like yours. It connects to your bank accounts, tracks your job expenses, manages subcontractor payments, and generates the reports your tax preparer needs — all in one place.
The key is setting it up correctly from the start. Here's how.
Before you open QuickBooks: get a dedicated business bank account
If your business income and expenses are still running through your personal bank account, fix this first. A dedicated business checking account is the foundation everything else is built on. It makes your bookkeeping cleaner, your deductions more complete, and your records far easier to review if you're ever audited.
Open a business checking account at your local Maine bank or credit union, and get a dedicated business credit or debit card to use for all business purchases. This one step eliminates more bookkeeping headaches than anything else you can do.
Choosing the right QuickBooks Online plan
For most Maine contractors, the Plus plan is the right choice. Here's why it's worth the step up from Simple Start or Essentials:
Plus (~$115/month) includes project tracking and job costing — essential features for contractors who need to know what each job is actually earning
It also includes class and location tracking, which is useful if you work across multiple service areas or run more than one type of work
If you're a solo operator doing straightforward work without subcontractors, Essentials (~$75/month) may be sufficient. But if you're managing multiple jobs at once and want to track profitability by project, Plus is worth it.
Setting up your chart of accounts
Your chart of accounts is the list of categories every dollar gets sorted into. For a Maine contracting business, a clean setup should include:
Income accounts:
Construction Income
Service & Repair Income
Materials Income (if you bill materials separately)
Expense accounts:
Materials & Supplies
Subcontractor Costs
Vehicle & Mileage
Tools & Equipment
Insurance
Licenses & Permits
Marketing & Advertising
Office Expenses
Payroll (if applicable)
Getting these categories right from the start means your reports will reflect the true financial picture of your business — not just a jumble of transactions with no context.
Connecting your bank and credit card accounts
Once your chart of accounts is set up, connect your business bank account and business credit card. QuickBooks will automatically pull in transactions daily and prompt you to categorize them.
The first pass takes a little time. After that, QuickBooks learns your patterns and suggests categories automatically. Most contractors spend 30–60 minutes a week keeping their books current once the initial setup is done — far less time than dealing with a backlog at tax time.
Setting up project tracking and job costing
This is the feature that makes QuickBooks Plus genuinely powerful for contractors.
Job costing lets you assign every expense — materials, labor, subcontractor costs — to a specific project. When the job is complete, you can run a report that shows exactly what it cost versus what it earned. Over time, this tells you which types of jobs are most profitable, which clients are worth prioritizing, and where your estimates tend to go wrong.
Most Maine contractors have never seen this data. When you do, it changes how you bid and how you run your business.
To set this up, turn on the Projects feature in QuickBooks settings, create a project for each active job, and make a habit of assigning expenses to projects as they're entered. It takes a few extra seconds per transaction and delivers enormous clarity over time.
Setting up 1099 tracking for subcontractors
If you pay subcontractors, QuickBooks makes 1099 compliance straightforward — but only if it's set up correctly.
For each subcontractor you pay $2000 or more in a year, you'll need their name, address, and Tax ID number. Add each subcontractor as a vendor in QuickBooks and mark them as eligible for a 1099. QuickBooks will track their payments automatically and make filing 1099-NECs at year end simple.
Don't wait until January to collect this information. Getting it upfront when you bring a subcontractor on saves a lot of chasing later.
Running your first reports
Once a month or two of transactions are in and categorized, run these reports:
Profit & Loss — your income minus expenses for any time period. This tells you whether your business is actually profitable after all costs are accounted for
Project Profitability — shows which jobs made money and which didn't
Accounts Receivable Aging — shows which invoices are outstanding and how long they've been unpaid
These three reports give you a complete picture of your business finances. Most contractors find something surprising the first time they look at them — and almost always something actionable.
You don't have to do this alone
Setting up QuickBooks correctly takes a few hours upfront but saves significant time and money over the course of a year. If the setup feels overwhelming or you're not sure whether your current books are configured correctly, a bookkeeper who works with contractors can get you set up right and make sure nothing important is missing.
McAfee's Bookkeeping offers QuickBooks Online setup for Maine contractors and trades businesses. If you'd like your books set up correctly from the start — or cleaned up if they've gotten complicated — we'd love to help. Schedule a free consultation here.
