Most bookkeepers learn construction from the outside. Aldebooks comes at it from the inside, from job sites and development projects, which is exactly why the books actually make sense.
"Good companies do great work and still don't know if they made money on it."
That is the problem Aldebooks was built to fix. Our roots are on the operations side of construction and real estate running projects and managing the work, not just recording it after the fact. That means we have lived with the parts of the business that bookkeeping is supposed to capture but usually does not: progress draws that come in stages, holdbacks sitting on the books for months, subcontractors to pay and report, change orders that quietly move the math, and equipment costs that have to land on the right job to mean anything.
We saw the same pattern over and over. A company would finish a project, feel good about it, and only discover months later, if ever, that the job barely broke even. Not because the work was bad, but because the books weren't built to tell them in time. Bookkeeping was treated as paperwork for the government, not as information the business could actually use.
Aldebooks exists to close that gap. The idea is simple: bookkeeping for a project business should tell you what's happening while you can still do something about it. Which jobs are making money. Where cash is going to be tight before it actually is. What is owed to the CRA so it is set aside, not scrambled for. That is a different job than reconciling a coffee shop till, and it needs someone who understands how the work is bid, billed and built.
That is also why we do not try to be everything to everyone. We work with construction and real estate businesses: general contractors, builders, trades, subcontractors, renovators, landlords, property managers and developers. Nothing else. It keeps us fluent in the things that matter and lets us set books up the right way the first time.
A generalist bookkeeper can keep a tidy general ledger. The trouble is that a tidy ledger can still hide everything you actually need to know. Lump all your labour, materials, subs and equipment into a few big categories and the books balance perfectly while telling you nothing about which project carried the quarter and which one lost money.
Construction and real estate involve details that generalists rarely handle well: job costing, progress billing, retainage, work‑in‑progress, T5018 subcontractor slips, WSIB, HST that applies differently to a build than to a residential rental, and the lumpy cash flow that comes from getting paid in draws. Get these wrong and it costs real money: tax surprises, penalties, and decisions made on numbers that were never right. Getting them right is the whole point of working with a specialist.
You should be able to read your own monthly report and know what to do next, without an accounting degree.
Books closed by the 10th. Reliability matters more than fancy reports you never look at.
HST set aside, deadlines tracked, jobs costed. Fewer fire drills, more control.
A real person who understands the work and answers when you have a question mid-month.
Books are closed by the 10th of each month. Clients get a monthly report that covers what they actually need to see: P&L, job profitability, HST balance, payroll summary, and a short note on anything worth flagging. Questions during the month get a direct email response.
We work in QuickBooks Online, with Dext or Hubdoc for receipt capture. Your data stays in your own account. Everything runs under a signed engagement letter and we will sign an NDA on request.
Most clients upload or forward receipts as they come in through the month. Bank and credit card feeds pull automatically. Payroll hours are submitted each period. The monthly close is handled on our end. The goal is that you spend less than 10 minutes a month on admin and still have a clear picture of where the business stands.
We're based in Ottawa and work with businesses across the region, including Kanata, Barrhaven, Nepean, Orléans, Stittsville and the surrounding area. Because everything runs in the cloud, we're in your books in real time without needing to be on site. And because there are no lock‑in contracts, we earn the relationship every month rather than trapping you in one.
Book a free bookkeeping review. We'll look at where your books stand today and show you what clear, construction‑literate bookkeeping would look like for your business.
No obligation · No lock‑in contracts · Ottawa‑based specialists