It's October. Your accountant emails you asking for job-by-job revenue, materials costs, and anything you paid subs this quarter. You tell her you'll have it by Friday.
Thursday night, you're sitting at the kitchen table with your laptop, three months of bank statements, a folder of crumpled receipts, and a yellow legal pad. You're reverse-engineering your own business from scratch. You've been here before.
This isn't a tax problem. It's a bookkeeping problem that shows up at tax time.
The Real Cost Isn't the Accountant's Hours — It's Yours
Solo GCs tend to undercount this one. You're not billing $175/hr when you're doing paperwork at 10pm, so it feels free. It's not. That's three hours you won't sleep, or three hours you could've spent estimating next month's pipeline.
And if your accountant is billing by the hour to sort through whatever you hand her? That's real money out the door for work a $29 tool could've already done.
The multi-crew platforms — Jobber, Buildertrend, Housecall Pro — do have accounting integrations. They also charge you for crew scheduling, multi-foreman dispatch, and a dozen other features you'll never touch as a one-person operation. You're paying for the whole machine when you only need the odometer.
Chisel is $29/mo flat. No tiers, no per-user fees. Built for solo GCs who don't need crew management software — and priced that way, because it doesn't have any.
What Clean Books Actually Look Like
Here's what happens when your job data lives in one place all year long:
Every estimate you write goes into Chisel. Material costs, labor, markup — all itemized from the start.
Every invoice is generated from that estimate. No re-typing, no copy-paste errors. The numbers match because they came from the same place.
Every payment collected through Stripe gets logged against the job automatically.
Every receipt — lumber yard, hardware run, rental equipment — gets scanned with your phone. Chisel's AI OCR reads the amount, the vendor, and the date. Filed under the job.
At the end of the quarter, you hit export to QuickBooks. Your accountant gets organized data. You get your Thursday night back.
"I Already Have QuickBooks"
Good. Chisel doesn't replace it — it feeds it.
QuickBooks is built for accountants. Chisel is built for you, on the job. You're not going to open QuickBooks to write an estimate while you're standing in a customer's kitchen. You're going to use something fast, on your phone, that looks professional and doesn't require a tutorial.
Chisel handles the job: estimates, change orders, invoices, payments, customer approvals, receipts. At tax time, everything moves to QuickBooks in one export. Your accountant sees clean, organized numbers. You never had to be your own bookkeeper to get there.
The Pattern That Kills Solo GCs at Tax Time
You take a job. You write an estimate on a notepad (or in your head). You buy materials and stuff the receipt in the console. You invoice the customer via Venmo or a QuickBooks invoice you typed manually. You collect payment. Six months later, you cannot reconstruct what that job actually cost you — or what margin you ran.
Multiply that by 20 jobs a year and you have no idea if your business made money or just looked like it did.
The fix isn't hiring someone. The fix is a system that captures data while you're already doing the work — so reconstructing it later isn't a project.
Start Before Q4 Hits
If you wait until November to get organized, you're digging out of a deeper hole. Get Chisel running now, log the next job from estimate to receipt, and see how different it feels when your accountant asks for numbers in October.
14 days free. $29/mo after. No crew management features you don't need.
