For contractors doing $1M–$10M
Know which jobs are actually making money.
PhurFriend sorts every cost onto the right job, flags the ones running over before they finish, and produces the WIP schedule your bank asks for. No spreadsheets, no forty hours of training.
Load a sample contractor's books in one click and see every report populated before you put in anything of your own.
A service-disabled veteran-owned small business building for the trades.
Most contractors find out too late
The job finishes, the invoices are paid, and only then does anyone work out it lost money. By that point the crew is on the next one and the same mistake is already being repeated.
It is not carelessness. Job costing in generic bookkeeping software takes manual setup that nobody keeps up with, and industry-wide, a quarter to a third of card spend never gets assigned to a job at all. The tools built properly for construction want weeks of training and several hundred dollars a month before anyone has touched them.
What you get
Six things, each of which a contractor can check for themselves.
Know which jobs make money, while you can still change it
Every cost lands on the right job and cost category. When a category passes its budget by more than 10%, the job is flagged — and a job forecast to finish over is flagged before it gets there, while there is still work left to change the outcome.
Labor, materials, equipment and subcontractor. Four categories, not forty.
The WIP schedule your bank keeps asking for
Percent complete, earned revenue, and whether you are over or under billed — the report a surety or lender wants, produced from costs you have already entered rather than a spreadsheet rebuilt every quarter.
Retainage tracked separately. As at any date, not just today.
Certified payroll that checks itself before you sign
Every incumbent prints the WH-347. PhurFriend checks the week against the wage determination first and tells you what is owed, while it is still a payroll correction rather than a federal finding.
Fringe counted toward the package, as Davis-Bacon allows.
It learns how you file things
Correct a vendor once or twice and it stops asking. Costs it cannot confidently place wait for you instead of being guessed at — a wrong job assignment quietly corrupts the report you show your bank.
Bank feed or CSV. Photograph a receipt and it reads that too.
Paperwork that expires, watched for you
Subcontractor insurance certificates, W-9s, lien waivers and 1099 thresholds. Chasing a certificate in March is a text message. Chasing it after a claim is something else.
Tells you what you already paid while a sub's cover was lapsed.
A record that does not move
Close a week and the position freezes. Later change orders and corrections do not rewrite it, which is what makes the history worth showing a lender a year later.
Write-once, enforced by the database. Not by us either.
How it compares
Honestly. The purpose-built systems are good products — they are just expensive, and they assume you have weeks to learn them.
| PhurFriend | QuickBooks | Sage / Foundation | Buildertrend | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price per month | $149.99 | $115–276 | $200–400+ | $499–799 |
| Real job costing | Yes | Manual setup | Yes | Shallow |
| WIP schedule | Yes | — | Yes | — |
| Over/underbilling | Yes | — | Yes | — |
| Retainage | Yes | — | Yes | Partial |
| Change orders | Yes | — | Yes | Yes |
| Certified payroll | Yes | — | Yes | — |
| Costs sorted automatically | Yes | — | — | — |
| Setup time | Minutes | Hours | 20–40 hrs training | Days |
| Price published | Yes | Yes | — | — |
| Users included | Unlimited | Per seat | Per seat | Per seat |
| Export everything, free | Yes | Partial | — | Partial |
Based on published pricing and verified reviews as of September 2026. Competitors change; if something here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
One price, published, and it stays put
You should not have to book a call to find out what software costs, and you should not find your bill has doubled in year three.
Everything, per company
$149.99/ month
- Unlimited jobs and users
- Your bookkeeper and accountant included
- Bank feeds, receipts and CSV import
- Certified payroll and WIP reporting
- Export everything, any time, free
Cancel in one click, any time. Not what you expected? Tell us within thirty days and we refund it. We will not raise the price on you after you sign up.
The honest objections
Everything below is a fair thing to be worried about. Here is what we would say to your face.
I have never heard of you.
Fair. We are new and small, which cuts both ways: there is no reference list to show you, and when you call you get the person who built it rather than a script and a queue. Poor support is the single loudest complaint in reviews of every product on this page — being small is the one thing that fixes it.
I do not trust AI with my books.
Neither would we, if it guessed. It never assigns a cost it is unsure about — those wait for you, with its reasoning shown. Every assignment can be changed in two clicks, and it learns from the correction. The over-budget maths and the payroll checks contain no AI at all; those are arithmetic, and they are tested.
What if you go out of business?
You export everything as CSV, today or any day, free and without asking anyone — jobs, costs, billings, payroll, notes, the lot, in one file. The only things held back are your bank connection token and unused invite codes, because those are live credentials rather than records. Nothing is in a proprietary format. If we ever shut down we would tell you well in advance and leave the exports running.
I already pay a bookkeeper. Are you telling me to fire them?
No. Give them a login. Most of what a construction bookkeeper spends time on is sorting costs onto jobs, which is the part this does automatically — so you get the same person doing the work that actually needs judgement.
$149.99 is more than QuickBooks.
It is. The comparison that matters is a bookkeeper who genuinely understands construction at $1,500–$3,000 a month, or one job that quietly lost $8,000 because nobody noticed until it finished. If neither of those is a risk for you, QuickBooks is genuinely fine and we would rather you kept it. You can cancel in one click if we are wrong about that.
What if it is wrong and I certify a bad payroll?
You sign the WH-347, not us — so the software checks the week against the wage determination before you file and shows the arithmetic: who is short, by how much, across how many hours. It is designed to make an underpayment visible while it is still a payroll correction. Check it before you sign, as you would anything sworn.
Questions contractors ask
- Do I have to stop using QuickBooks?
- No. Most contractors keep QuickBooks for tax and payroll and use PhurFriend for job costing and WIP — the two things QuickBooks cannot do properly. You can import your customer or project list straight from it.
- How does it get my costs?
- Connect your bank and they arrive on their own, or upload a CSV export. Card statements work too — we read whichever way your bank writes the amounts. You can also photograph a receipt and it reads the vendor, date, total and any job number written on it.
- What if it puts a cost on the wrong job?
- Change it in two clicks, and it learns from the correction. Anything it is not confident about is never assigned in the first place — it waits for you. A wrong assignment silently corrupts the numbers you show your bank, so it does not guess.
- Is my bank login safe?
- We never see it. Bank connections go through Plaid, where you sign in on their screen; what comes back is permission to read transactions. PhurFriend cannot move money and holds no banking password.
- Can my accountant get in?
- Yes, with a read-only seat. They see everything and download every report, and nothing they do changes your books. Enforced by the database, not by hiding buttons.
- What happens to my data if I leave?
- One button, one file, any time, free, without asking anyone — every table we hold for you. We would rather keep you because the product is good than because leaving is difficult.
- Do I need to understand construction accounting?
- No. If you can tell us what a job should cost, PhurFriend does the rest and explains what it found in plain language. The competing products are reviewed as needing twenty to forty hours of training. This takes an afternoon.
- Does it do payroll?
- It reports on payroll, it does not run it. You keep cutting cheques wherever you do now, and PhurFriend produces the certified payroll reports and checks them for underpayment before you file.
Something else?
Ask a real person. We would rather answer a hard question now than have you find out later that this was not the right fit.
Email us