Construction accounting software compared

2026-10-26Updated 2026-11-128 min read

Construction accounting software is a general ledger that knows about jobs: every cost posts to a job and a cost code, an invoice can be a progress bill, and retainage sits on its own line on both sides of the books. Any of the vendors below will keep clean books. What separates them is whether their own pages say they handle the paperwork a subcontractor's office lives in: the AIA G702 and G703, retainage held and owed, lien waivers, and certified payroll. Here is what each one says, and what it leaves out.

Accounting software for contractors, vendor by vendor

Our pick: the one that holds retainage and waivers inside the ledger, not beside it

Small and mid-sized contractor books

The ERP tier

“Not stated” means the vendor's own page does not say. Ask in the demo; do not assume.

QuickBooks: good books, outside tools for the pay app

Most subcontractors already run QuickBooks, and for the general ledger it is fine. Intuit's pricing page shows QuickBooks Online Plus at $140 a month for five users, with project profitability tracking in the plan and an introductory discount for the first three months. Desktop Enterprise has a contractor edition. Intuit's page for it covers estimates, prepayments on estimates and sales orders, job costs tracked in real time, Desktop Payroll that uses job costing data, and reports bundled for contractors. It names four tiers and prints no price for any of them.

Read what that page leaves out. It does not mention AIA billing, retainage, lien waivers or certified payroll. So a sub on QuickBooks builds the G702 and G703 somewhere else, in a spreadsheet or in pay application software, and posts the result as an invoice. That works for years if one person keeps retainage receivable reconciled by hand. It stops working when that person is on vacation in the week the pay app is due.

FOUNDATION, Sage 100 Contractor and ComputerEase: built around the job

FOUNDATION is the one whose own pages cover the most of this site's paperwork. Job costing, payroll, purchase orders and subcontracts, and accounts receivable come built in; mobile time tracking, service dispatch, equipment and project management are add-ons. Its receivables module offers AIA billing for progress-billing jobs and ages A/R and retainage by job, customer and project manager. Its payables module enters vendor invoices with their retainage and lets you pick which invoices and retainage to pay by due date, discount and hold. Both create and print lien waivers, and payroll produces certified payroll reports in print or electronic form for state, federal and local agencies.

The catch is price. FOUNDATION says your business is not standard, so its pricing is not either: you are quoted by the modules you take.

Sage 100 Contractor is aimed, in Sage's words, at small to mid-sized contractors, covering construction and service management in one out-of-the-box product. Its page names certified payroll, AIA billings and lien waivers as things you manage in one tool, and Sage Construction Management can be added for bids and project workflows. The page does not say how it holds retainage, and it prints no price. Its larger sibling, Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate, serves contractors, developers and property managers and ships more than 1,400 prebuilt report formats.

Deltek's ComputerEase, read on 2026-11-03, is pitched at small to mid-sized and specialty contractors that have outgrown generic books. Its page names job costing by job, phase and cost code, WIP reporting, AIA and unit billing, and union and certified payroll with prevailing wage. It is the one page in this group that describes retainage on its own: it says you can forecast when retainage will release and see total exposure across all jobs. It offers cloud hosting, does not mention lien waivers, and prints no price, saying only that a license starts with a payment for the first month.

Premier, Vista, Spectrum, Jonas and CMiC: when it is an ERP decision

Premier is fully cloud-based, hosted on Microsoft Azure, and its quote form starts by asking whether you are a general contractor, land developer, subcontractor or home builder. It bills by progress billing (AIA), cost-plus, lender draws and time and materials, tracks retainage on subcontractor payments, and generates the conditional or unconditional waiver when the invoice or check is created, then emails it for signature. It runs unlimited companies with intercompany entries, and it handles certified payroll. Premier says its implementation team can have a customer operational in as few as 60 days.

Trimble sells two ERPs under the Viewpoint name. Vista covers job cost accounting with WIP, accounts-payable invoice capture that turns PDF vendor invoices into unapproved invoice entries, HR and payroll across union, multi-state and multi-company rules, plus service and equipment, and it sits inside Trimble Construction One. Spectrum is pitched as the hub connecting field, service and project management to accounting, payroll and HR, with payroll across multiple unions. Neither product page mentions AIA billing, retainage or lien waivers, and both send pricing to a contact form or a phone call. If you are weighing either, you have outgrown a comparison page and need a scripted demo.

Jonas Construction Software, read on 2026-11-03, sells its ERP to mechanical, electrical, plumbing, HVAC and specialty contractors. Its receivables page lists six ways to bill (progress, AIA, time and materials, cost plus, flat rate and unit price), shows lien waivers alongside each bill's other documents, and reports WIP. Payroll covers certified, union and multi-union work in the U.S. and Canada. It runs on Jonas Cloud, hosted on Microsoft Azure, and its pages do not say how it holds retainage.

CMiC describes its accounting as the financial core of an ERP for general and specialty contractors: payables, receivables, billing and a consolidated general ledger on one database, with every transaction posting to the ledger and to job cost at once. Its accounting page does not mention AIA forms, retainage, lien waivers or certified payroll, and its pricing page is a quote form.

Retainage is the test most demos skip

Retainage is two ledgers, not one. There is what your customer holds back from you, a receivable you cannot collect until the job closes out, and what you hold back from your own subs, a payable you must not release early. Construction accounting software has to keep both apart from ordinary A/R and A/P, or your aging report tells you money is collectible this month when it is not.

Three questions sort the vendors fast. Does it hold retainage per line of the schedule of values, the way a G703 continuation sheet can carry it, or only on the invoice total? Can it bill the retainage release as its own invoice at close-out? Does the aging report show retainage in its own column? On 2026-10-26, FOUNDATION's pages describe both sides and Premier's describe retainage on subcontractor payments; on 2026-11-03, ComputerEase's described retainage management with a release forecast across jobs; the others do not say. Rates and release rules differ by state, so check retainage laws by state and run the numbers once in the retainage calculator before you trust any system's default.

Lien waivers follow the check

A lien waiver is an accounting document dressed as a legal one. The conditional waiver goes out with the pay app; the unconditional one is signed only when the money has cleared (the four lien waiver types explain why that order matters). When waivers live in a project tool and payments live in the ledger, someone reconciles the two by hand every month, and that is where an unconditional waiver gets signed against a check that bounced.

Premier ties the waiver to the invoice or check that triggers it. FOUNDATION prints waivers from payables and receivables. Sage 100 Contractor names them. If your ledger does not, a dedicated lien waiver software tool, or the free lien waiver generator for low volumes, closes the gap.

Only one vendor prints a price

On 2026-10-26 only Intuit printed a dollar figure: QuickBooks Online Plus at $140 a month for five users. FOUNDATION prices by the modules you take. Premier builds a quote from your company type and user count. Sage 100 Contractor, Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate, Vista and Spectrum print no price on their product pages. Read on 2026-11-03, Jonas builds a custom quote from a core user license, modules, hosting and add-ons; CMiC's pricing page is a quote form; and ComputerEase prints no figure, saying only that a license starts with a first-month payment. So any subscription number you see quoted for those elsewhere is somebody's deal, not a published rate.

Ask for two figures in writing: the yearly subscription at your user count, and the one-time cost of setup and moving your open jobs, retainage balances and vendor history across. The second is the one that surprises people.

Best accounting software for a small construction business

For a small construction company with a handful of open jobs, no prevailing-wage work and one or two general contractors, the honest answer is the books you already keep. Bill each month from a checked schedule of values, build the application in the free pay application generator, and post the result as an invoice. The progress billing guide covers the discipline that keeps it reconciling.

Move to construction accounting software when one of three things happens: month-end close cannot split what customers owe you from the retainage they hold, certified payroll arrives with a public job, or you start running a second company. Each of those is a ledger problem, and that is when the vendors above start earning their price. If certified payroll is the only gap, compare construction payroll software first: some of it reports from the payroll you already run.