For many craftsmen, bookkeeping is a chore, as they prefer to spend their time on the job rather than in the office. Thanks to increasing digitalization and the advanced features of online business accounts, you can now optimize your administrative time by automating many of your accounting tasks.
The specific features of the construction industry that affect your bookkeeping
As the manager of a construction business, you are responsible for keeping your own accounts. You may choose to delegate certain tasks to an accounting firm, such as auditing your accounts or drawing up your annual financial statements. In this case, you retain responsibility for bookkeeping.
The specificities of the construction industry have an impact on your company's accounting.
Down payments
Building and civil engineering projects can involve large-scale works that are spread over time, sometimes even over several financial years. To generate the cash flow needed to get the job off the ground, estimates specify a percentage deposit to be paid on signature, as an advance on the work to be carried out. Managing down-payments requires special monitoring.
Status invoices
These are progress invoices, or interim invoices, which are issued as the work progresses at predefined intervals, such as monthly. These documents, drawn up for long-term projects, must be accounted for on a progress or completion basis.
The different VAT rates
As a tradesman in the building and civil engineering sector, you apply different VAT rates to different projects. For example, VAT at the standard rate of 20% is applied to new housing, intermediate VAT at 10% to improvement work, and VAT at 5.5% to energy renovation work. Not to mention the possibility of reverse-charge VAT on subcontracted work.
These different VAT rates make accounting complex and require constant, rigorous monitoring.
The pro rata account
If you're sharing a site with other construction companies, you'll set up a pro rata account to group together the common expenses incurred on the site: marking out, water, electricity, maintenance... All these expenses will be listed and divided between the various building and civil engineering contractors on a pro rata basis for each service provided. You will then need to book the pro rata account.
How do you automate your accounting tasks?
Entering accounting entries manually can be tedious and time-consuming. Imagine if data analysis could be done automatically, without you having to intervene?
Digitization opens up a wide range of possibilities in terms of process automation, and this principle is not limited to sorting goods in logistics warehouses.
Thanks to the development of digital tools, many software solutions are now available to support these procedures. When it comes to financial management, automating your construction company's accounting tasks can involve, for example :
- Pre-accounting (collection, filing, archiving of various documents)
- Entering your bank statements
- Calculating your social security contributions and payroll taxes
- VAT management
- Invoice justification
- Managing your expense accounts
- Integrating business expenses
- Cash flow monitoring...
Automated processes avoid human error on repetitive tasks. Digitizing your accounting processes saves you precious time, which you can then devote to your sales cycle or construction sites.
You'll also reduce the cost of your administrative management, while ensuring that your accounting is legally compliant.
The online business account optimizes the time you spend managing your accounting tasks
Technological advances have enabled the development of data-processing functionalities, such as optical character recognition (OCR), which can be used not only to check the conformity of documents, but also to extract information from them. Saas and cloud solutions ensure that files are archived and available in real time, facilitating the management of accounting tasks.
To support this digital ecosystem at the service of your construction company, you can rely on the dedicated features of the online professional account.
Online account compatibility with all accounting software
Connecting your business bank account to your accounting software is a real asset when it comes to automating tasks. You can easily retrieve information from bank statements. Transaction export facilitates accounting entries in the cash journal.
You can also set up access for your accountant to enable customized data export at the end of each period.
Expense claim management with archiving and probative value
In the TPE pro account management interface, each transaction is instantly associated with its corresponding receipt. Simply take a photo of the ticket or invoice from your smartphone to send the digital copy directly to your customer area. You avoid accumulating paperwork to sort through, and reduce the risk of loss or input errors.
An integrated invoicing tool for justified sales
The specificities of the construction industry make invoicing a complex task. The online professional account gives you an integrated invoicing tool to simplify the production of your estimates and invoices, in full compliance with legal requirements.
From your management interface, you can then control tasks linked to your invoicing, such as tracking payments, archiving or scheduling automatic reminders.
Setting up your chart of accounts
From the personal area of your online account, you can optimize accounting reconciliation by configuring the nomenclature so that the various operations are assigned directly to each sub-class of the expense account.