Every April, some version of this happens to a solo GC: the accountant sends an email asking for income by project, expense receipts, and a list of who paid what and when. And the contractor spends a weekend digging through text threads, bank statements, a notes app, and three different invoice PDFs trying to reconstruct a year's worth of jobs.
That's not a tax problem. That's a tracking problem — and it costs real money, either in accountant hours sorting out your mess, or in deductions you can't prove and end up leaving on the table.
Here's the thing: the tools built to fix this usually cost more than the problem itself.
The Software Trap for Solo GCs
The big CRMs — the ones built for crews of 10 or 15 — have QuickBooks integrations. They'll sync your invoices, your expenses, your payroll. But they also come loaded with crew scheduling, multi-foreman dispatch, fleet tracking, and a dozen other features you'll never touch as a one-person operation. You're paying for all of it whether you use it or not.
That's the trap. You need clean financials at tax time. You don't need to manage a crew of 15. But the software bundles them together, so you're stuck paying for both.
Chisel is $29 a month, flat. No tiers. No per-user fees. It's built specifically for solo GCs — which means it has exactly what you need and nothing you don't. Crew scheduling isn't in there. Multi-foreman dispatch isn't in there. What is in there: estimates, invoices, payments, change orders, receipts — and a clean QuickBooks export when it's time to close the books.
What "Clean Books" Actually Looks Like in Practice
If you're running jobs through Chisel all year, here's what tax time looks like:
Every estimate you write is tracked. Every invoice you send — and every payment you collect through Stripe — is logged against the job. Your accountant can see exactly what came in and when.
Receipts don't disappear. Chisel's AI receipt scanner lets you photograph a lumber receipt or hardware store bill right at the register. It reads the amount and vendor and files it. By December, you have 12 months of job expenses sitting in the app, not shoeboxed in your truck.
One export, done. When your accountant asks for the data, you export it to QuickBooks. No spreadsheet archaeology. No weekend of reconstructing what happened in March. You pull the file, send it, and move on.
That's it. That's the whole workflow.
Why This Matters More for Solo GCs Than Anyone Else
Big contractors have office managers and bookkeepers. They have people whose whole job is to keep the financials clean. You don't. You're the GC, the estimator, the project manager, and the AP department — all in one. Every hour you spend untangling your books at tax time is an hour you're not estimating new work or finishing a job.
The fix isn't to hire a bookkeeper for your scale of business. The fix is to use software that keeps things tidy as you go, so there's nothing to untangle later.
That software doesn't need to cost $100+ a month. It doesn't need to come with a suite of features sized for a company five times bigger than yours.
The Bottom Line
$29 a month. Everything a solo GC needs to run jobs and close the books clean at tax time — without paying for the bloat built for crews you don't have.
14 days free. No credit card required to start.
