Questions contractors ask
before working with Marawood

Marawood provides specialized construction accounting and CFO-level advisory to Western Canadian contractors. Our work includes monthly bookkeeping and reconciliations, job costing integrated to your field data, WIP and WOH reporting to surety standards, tax filings (GST, T4, T5018), cash flow management, annual budgeting, and strategic advisory.

We are not a general accounting firm that also takes construction clients. Construction is all we do — and that focus is what makes the work useful. We understand percentage of completion accounting, holdback rules, change order tracking, T5018 filing requirements, and the specific financial ratios that sureties and lenders scrutinize.

We work exclusively with construction contractors — general contractors, subcontractors, homebuilders, and renovators doing between $500K and $60M in annual revenue across Western Canada. Our clients include mechanical, electrical, civil, concrete, framing, roofing, and specialty trade contractors.

We don't work with restaurants, retail, professional services, or general small business. Construction accounting has its own language, its own standards, and its own relationship with sureties and lenders. That focus is what makes the work useful.

Most of our clients still have a year-end CPA firm — and that relationship stays. But the two roles have fundamentally different objectives.

Your year-end CPA is systematized for compliance — tax returns, corporate filings, and financial statement preparation. That work is important, but it has nothing to do with running a construction business. Their systems, their training, and their processes are built around year-end work, not around job costing, WIP schedules, percentage of completion, or the financial ratios that sureties and lenders scrutinize.

Marawood is systematized for construction accounting — growing the business, improving bonding capacity, managing cash flow against backlog, and producing the financial intelligence that lets you make good decisions in real time. We work every month, not just at year-end.

In practice these two roles complement each other well. We work in partnership with a number of year-end CPA firms who refer clients to us specifically because their clients need construction-specific monthly accounting that falls outside their firm's scope. When we hand off the year-end package, it arrives clean, construction-ready, and in far better shape than most CPA firms typically receive — which means their work is faster and your bill is lower.

A general bookkeeper codes transactions and reconciles bank accounts. That's necessary — but not sufficient for a construction business with active jobs and financial reporting obligations to sureties or lenders.

What Marawood adds on top of that:

• WIP schedules prepared to surety standards — monthly, not just at year-end
• Job costing integrated to your field data in near real-time
• Retainage tracked and reported separately from general AR
• Cash flow forecasts tied to your project backlog
• Year-end handoff package for your external tax preparer
• Construction-specific filings: T5018, holdback accounting, percentage of completion

Most general bookkeepers don't have construction-specific training. The question isn't whether to replace them — it's whether what they produce is serving your business and your relationships with your surety and bank.

No. We work with contractors across Western Canada — Alberta, BC, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. Everything we do is cloud-based: QuickBooks Online, Sage Intacct, Dext, Plooto, and your project management software all run in your browser. We meet by video, share documents through a secure client portal, and communicate the same way your project teams already do.

Geography has not been a barrier for any of our clients, including those working on remote and camp-based projects. If you're in Alberta, in-person meetings are available when useful — but never required.

Apprentice — Clean Books & Compliance: The foundation every construction business needs. Transaction coding, bank and credit card reconciliations, supplier reconciliations, GST filings, monthly financial statements, Dext A/P automation, and A/P and A/R workflow standardization.

Journeyman — Job Costing Clarity & Bonding-Ready: Everything in Apprentice plus payroll allocations to job cost, year-end handoff package for your tax preparer, T4 and T5018 filings, monthly WIP and WOH schedules to surety standards, variance analysis, KPI dashboard, cash flow statement, annual budgeting, 6-week cash flow management, and Plooto payments automation.

Red Seal — CFO Level Insight & Scalable Growth: Everything in Journeyman plus CFO-level advisory and strategic planning, advanced cash flow with what-if scenarios, overhead recovery analysis, financing and loan package preparation, advanced KPI dashboard and MD&A, real-time dashboards, custom workflows, and PM software integration.

These tiers are starting points — every engagement is tailored to the client's situation. À la carte services are available for contractors whose needs span tiers or don't fit neatly into one package.

If you primarily need clean, accurate books and statutory compliance — Apprentice is the right starting point. If you have active jobs, need monthly WIP and job costing, and want a year-end handoff package ready for your tax preparer — Journeyman is where most of our clients land. If you're scaling aggressively and want CFO-level strategic partnership alongside the financial infrastructure — Red Seal is built for you.

And if none of these fit perfectly, that's fine too. We offer fully tailored engagements and à la carte services for contractors whose needs span tiers or fall outside these structures entirely. The best way to figure out what's right is a free 30-minute call — book it here.

Absolutely. Bonding is one outcome of good financial reporting — not a prerequisite for working with us. Many of our clients are electrical, mechanical, civil, or service contractors who don't carry bonds. What they all share is a need for accurate job costing, clean monthly books, and financial reporting that reflects how construction actually works.

The Apprentice and Journeyman tiers are fully relevant regardless of whether you have an active surety relationship. If bonding becomes relevant as your business grows, the financial infrastructure will already be in place.

We connect to the platforms your team already uses. No rip-and-replace required. Our current platform integrations include:

• Accounting: QuickBooks Online, Sage Intacct
• Payroll: QuickBooks Online Payroll, Wagepoint, ADP
• Document capture & A/P: Dext
• Payments: Plooto
• Project management: Buildertrend, JobTread, Procore, Knowify, BuildOps
• Communication & documents: Microsoft 365, Google Workspace

We connect your project management software to your accounting system so job cost data flows in near real-time — eliminating the lag between what happens in the field and what appears in your books.

Most bond conversations don't break down because of losses. They break down because the WIP isn't believable to the underwriter. When WIP is only updated at year-end, when cost-to-complete estimates aren't driven by project managers, when underbillings are ignored because "cash is okay" — the surety can't trust the numbers. And when the surety can't trust the numbers, conservative capacity is the result.

Clean, monthly WIP reporting changes the entire underwriting conversation. When an underwriter can see margin trends across all active jobs, verify percentage complete, and trace billings to earned revenue — the conversation shifts from interrogation to partnership.

A review engagement is a level of CPA assurance above a compilation (Notice to Reader) and below an audit. The CPA performs analytical procedures and inquiry to provide limited assurance that your financial statements are plausible. Surety underwriters view review-engaged statements as significantly more credible than compilations — and apply higher working capital and net worth multiples accordingly.

For contractors pursuing larger municipal, provincial, or ICI work, a review engagement is typically the entry fee. Upgrading from a compilation to a review is often the single move that doubles available bonding capacity — without changing a single dollar on the balance sheet. Marawood prepares your books to the standard needed for your CPA to issue a review engagement.

A line of credit balance sitting in current liabilities reduces your surety-adjusted working capital dollar for dollar — and that reduction gets multiplied by the working capital multiple when surety calculates your bonding capacity. At a 10× multiple, a $150,000 LOC balance costs $1.5 million in bonding capacity.

Converting that LOC balance to a term loan moves it out of current liabilities entirely, instantly improving adjusted working capital. Marawood identifies and models these opportunities as part of every engagement — managing your balance sheet with bonding capacity in mind every month, not just at year-end.

You can model this yourself using our free Surety Bonding Capacity Estimator.

Our pricing is fixed monthly — not hourly — so you always know what you are paying and there are no surprises. The specific amount depends on your transaction volume, the number of active jobs, the complexity of your reporting, and the service tier you need.

Rather than a rate card that may not reflect your situation, every engagement is priced based on a detailed review of your specific circumstances. Most clients find that the monthly fee pays for itself many times over — through improved bonding capacity, cleaner cash flow, and time not spent managing books that were never built for construction. The best way to get a real number is a free 30-minute discovery call.

Typically 60 to 90 days to have a clean, surety-standard WIP schedule running monthly. The first month is usually the hardest — reconciling existing job costs, establishing opening positions on active projects, and working with your PMs on cost-to-complete estimates. After that, the ongoing monthly process is much faster.

If you have an annual surety meeting coming up, tell us the date. We will work backward from it and prioritize what needs to be clean first.

Book a free 30-minute discovery call. That conversation covers three things: where your reporting is now, what your surety and banking relationships require, and what the gap looks like. From there we build a proposal specific to your situation — the work to be done, the platforms we will use, and the monthly fee.

No pressure, no obligation. If we're not the right fit, we'll tell you. The call is genuinely free, genuinely useful, and genuinely 30 minutes. Book it here →

There is no catch. The tools are completely free — no account required, no credit card, no trial period, no locked features. You can use all eight tools as many times as you want, with any numbers you want, and print the results to PDF.

The tools exist because we believe contractors who understand their numbers make better decisions — and that is good for the industry regardless of whether you ever hire us.

No. Every calculation runs entirely within your browser using JavaScript. Nothing you enter — revenue figures, wage rates, balance sheet numbers, job costs — is transmitted to our servers, stored in a database, or accessible to anyone at Marawood. When you close the browser tab, the data is gone.

We were deliberate about this. Contractors should be able to run sensitive financial numbers without worrying about where they end up.

Eight free tools are currently available at marawood.ca/contractor-toolkit-calculators:

• Markup vs. Margin Calculator — understand the difference and find the markup you need to hit your margin target
• Construction Profitability Benchmark Calculator — compare your margins to 30 ICI trades across 7 revenue bands
• Burdened Labour Cost Calculator — true all-in cost per productive hour including CPP, EI, WCB, and benefits (Alberta 2026 rates)
• Equipment Buy vs. Rent Calculator — breakeven analysis and estimating rate for job costing
• Line of Credit Sizing Calculator — right-size your LOC based on your cash conversion cycle
• WIP & Over/Under Billing Calculator — see your true billing position across all active jobs
• Breakeven Revenue Calculator — minimum revenue needed to cover overhead, with sensitivity analysis
• Surety Bonding Capacity Estimator — how surety calculates your aggregate bonding limit, with strategies to improve it