QuickBooks Tips to Improve Your Bonding Capabilities

Three Quick Wins in QuickBooks to Add Surety Confidence to Your Financials

If you're like many contractors in growth mode, your bonding capacity may feel like the ceiling that limits your ability to grow. You share internal financial data with your surety partners, but you’re not always sure what builds their confidence - or if it actually holding you back. You want practical steps you can take today to improve how your numbers are viewed, without a complete financial overhaul. Most growing contractors rely on QuickBooks to manage their books, so the quick tips below assume that’s the system you’re using. These are straightforward fixes you can easily do yourself and each one helps improve the confidence a surety has in your data.

Track AR & AP and Run Reports on an Accrual Basis

• How to do it: Make sure every customer invoice (Accounts Receivable, aka AR) and every vendor bill (Accounts Payable, aka AP) is entered in QuickBooks, not just payments as they hit the bank. Then, when pulling your Balance Sheet and Profit & Loss reports, select the “Accrual” basis instead of “Cash.”

• Why it matters: For most contractors, AR generally outweighs AP. By tracking both and running reports on an accrual basis, you show more working capital and equity - two of the key metrics sureties rely on when evaluating bonding capacity.

Reconcile Your Books Every Month

• How to do it: Use QuickBooks’ “Reconcile” feature to match your books against your bank and credit card statements monthly. Don’t let this slip—it’s one of the simplest credibility checks you can provide.

• Why it matters: Clean, reconciled records prove your numbers are current and accurate. Underwriters move much faster when they can trust your financials.

Turn On Job Costing

• How to do it: In QuickBooks, set up each project as a “Customer: Job” (in Desktop) or “Project” (in Online). Enter labor, materials, subcontractors, and overhead to the job, then run Job Profitability reports regularly.

• Why it matters: Sureties don’t just look at company-wide profit—they want to see if each project is profitable. Job costing shows you understand your numbers at the project level, which builds confidence in your ability to take on more work.

These three steps are just the beginning. If you’d like to dive deeper into improving your financial reporting and positioning your business for greater bonding capacity, let's talk about how we can help.