QuickBooks alternative for contractors
QuickBooks is great accounting software — but it wasn't built to tell a contractor whether a job is making money. You can keep QuickBooks for the books and use Sevyn to actually know your real, per-job profit, fed automatically from your bank.
Why QuickBooks job costing breaks for contractors
- No construction cost codes. QuickBooks thinks in accounts and projects, not the materials / labor / subs / equipment breakdown a contractor estimates and tracks against.
- Everything is manual. Every transaction has to be hand-tagged to the right project, every week, or your job-cost reports quietly drift out of date.
- No real-time profit. You find out whether a job made money after the month closes and someone reconciles it — not while you can still do something about it.
- It's gated.Project/job-costing features live on the higher QBO tiers, and even then they're reporting, not a live profit signal.
What to use instead
Sevyn runs the whole job in one loop — lead, estimate from your own pricebook, branded proposal, job tracking — and then pulls your actual costs straight from your bank, matching each charge to the right job through your purchase orders. Your per-job and business profit is live and bank-true, and an AI alert flags a job the moment it starts drifting off its estimate.
| sevyn. | QuickBooks (for job costing) | |
|---|---|---|
| Construction cost codes | Built in | Not really — accounts/projects |
| Costs onto jobs | Auto from your bank, matched via POs | Manual weekly tagging |
| Real-time per-job profit | Yes | After month-end reconciliation |
| Margin-drift alerts | Yes | No |
| Estimating + proposals | Built in | No |
Sevyn works with QuickBooks, not against it
You don't have to fire your accountant or abandon your books. Sevyn pushes a clean copy of your invoices and payments to QuickBooks Online, so QuickBooks stays your system of record for accounting while Sevyn is where you see your real profit. No reconciling two systems by hand.
FAQ
Can QuickBooks do construction job costing?
Partly. QuickBooks Online can tag transactions to a project on its higher tiers, but it has no real construction cost codes, requires you to hand-tag every transaction to the right project, and doesn't give you a real-time per-job profit number. For most contractors it becomes a weekly maintenance chore that drifts out of date.
Do I have to leave QuickBooks to use Sevyn?
No. Sevyn is your job-cost and profit source of truth, and it pushes a clean copy to QuickBooks Online for your accountant. You keep QuickBooks for the books; you use Sevyn to actually know your profit per job.
How does Sevyn know my real costs without manual tagging?
You connect your business bank account; Sevyn pulls each transaction and matches it to the right job through your vendors and purchase orders, then records it as a job cost. Your profit updates automatically — no weekly tagging.
Is Sevyn cheaper than QuickBooks plus a job-costing add-on?
Sevyn is $149–$799/mo and includes estimating, proposals, job tracking, invoicing, and real-time profit. Many contractors run QuickBooks plus a separate estimating/job-costing tool plus a bookkeeper to reconcile them; Sevyn collapses that into one loop.