Finance & FP&A

How to analyze vendor and category spend as Construction and Contractor Founders

Finance & FP&AFor Construction and Contractor Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're running three jobs at once and trying to figure out why the Anderson remodel came in $14k over budget when your QuickBooks just shows a wall of vendor transactions with no job codes attached. You've got lumber from your main Home Depot account split across four projects, sub invoices that came in after the job closed, and fuel charges you can't remember if you approved. Every month you export a QuickBooks report to Excel, manually tag rows by job, and still can't tell whether Martinez Framing or your tile guy is the one killing your margins. This takes half a Sunday and the answer is usually already two weeks stale.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Finance & FP&AFor Construction and Contractor Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live vendor spend dashboard that pulls every transaction from your Plaid bank feeds and QuickBooks, buckets them by vendor and category, and flags anything that looks wrong — before you're standing on a slab wondering where the concrete budget went.

Automated monthly spend summaries by trade category (framing, electrical, plumbing, demo, materials) so you can see which subs and suppliers are eating margin across all active jobs, not just the one you're worried about today.

A recurring alert that catches new vendors charging your account, unusual invoice sizes from familiar subs, and month-over-month category swings — sent to your phone before your bookkeeper even sees it.

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Transaction Insights Runway Analysis

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule — bills, invoices, vendors, payments, and journal entries refresh automatically. Starch also syncs your Plaid bank accounts on a schedule, pulling categorized transactions and balances daily. For your field management software (Buildertrend, CoConstruct, or similar), Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed — to pull job cost summaries and match vendor charges to open projects. The Runway Analysis and Transaction Insights starter apps are the foundation; you describe the job-cost layer on top and Starch builds it.

Prompts to copy

Build me a vendor spend dashboard pulling from my Plaid accounts and QuickBooks. Group transactions by vendor and by category — I want categories like framing, electrical, plumbing, materials, equipment rental, and fuel. Show me month-over-month totals for each category and flag any vendor where this month's charges are more than 20% higher than their 90-day average.

Add a section that tracks recurring vendors — subs and suppliers who bill me every month — so I can see if someone slipped in an extra invoice or if a retainer I forgot to cancel is still running.

Connect my Buildertrend account through browser automation and pull job cost data so I can see which transactions map to which active projects.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect your Plaid accounts — Starch syncs your bank transactions on a schedule, so your checking, any job-specific accounts, and your business credit card are all pulling in automatically within minutes.

2 Connect QuickBooks — Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule, including vendors, bills, invoices, and payments. You'll have 20+ entity types available, which means every sub invoice and materials charge is in there.

3 Install the Transaction Insights starter app from the Starch App Store. Out of the box it shows spend by vendor and category with month-over-month trends and anomaly flags — a solid starting point for a GC.

4 Tell Starch to add construction-specific categories: 'Reclassify my transaction categories to match how I actually run jobs — framing, electrical, plumbing, concrete, roofing, demo, materials, equipment rental, fuel, and permits.' Starch updates the app to use your categories.

5 If you use Buildertrend or CoConstruct, connect it through browser automation: 'Log into my Buildertrend account and pull the job cost summary for each active project — I want total budgeted vs. actual spend per trade category per job.' Starch handles the login and scraping without any API setup.

6 Install the Runway Analysis starter app and connect it to Plaid and QuickBooks. This gives you the cash-runway view alongside the spend detail — you see both where money is going and how many months of operating cash you have left.

7 Set up the anomaly alert: 'Every Monday morning, check whether any vendor's charges in the past 7 days are more than 25% above their 90-day average. If yes, send me a Slack message with the vendor name, the amount, and the prior average.' Starch builds and schedules the automation.

8 Build a new-vendor alert: 'If a vendor appears in my transactions who hasn't charged me in the last 90 days, flag it immediately — I want to know about any new payee within 24 hours of the first charge.' Useful for catching unauthorized charges or forgotten commitments.

9 Create a sub-level spend view: 'Show me a table of every subcontractor who has billed me in the last 6 months, their total billed per month, and the job(s) each invoice was associated with.' This is your margin-leak diagnostic for recurring subs.

10 At month-end, run the job cost reconciliation prompt: 'Compare my QuickBooks vendor payments this month against my Buildertrend job budgets. Show me which jobs had vendor costs exceed budget by trade category, and list any sub invoices in QuickBooks that don't have a matching job code.' Starch cross-references the two sources and surfaces the gaps.

11 Save a monthly report automation: 'On the last Friday of each month, pull my vendor spend summary, job cost variances, and cash runway, and email me a plain-English summary I can read before my Monday morning site visits.' You stop spending Sunday mornings in Excel.

12 Fork the Transaction Insights app to add a materials price tracker: 'Track my lumber and concrete purchases separately and show me average cost per unit over time — I want to see if supplier prices are drifting before I finalize my next bid.'

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

April 2026 close — 4 active jobs, 11 active subs

Sample numbers from a real run

Martinez Framing (sub invoices, QuickBooks)	28,400
Home Depot (materials, Plaid)	14,220
Southwest Electric (sub invoices, QuickBooks)	11,800
Sunbelt Rentals — equipment (Plaid)	6,750
Fuel / vehicle (Plaid, categorized)	3,180
Unflagged new vendor: Acme Disposal (Plaid)	2,400
Concrete supply (QuickBooks bill)	9,600
Permits and fees (QuickBooks)	1,850

Running the April close, Starch's vendor spend dashboard flagged three things immediately. First, Martinez Framing billed $28,400 in April against a $22,000 monthly average — a $6,400 overage that turned out to be a February invoice they resubmitted with a new number. Starch caught it because it was 29% above the 90-day average and sent a Monday morning Slack alert. Second, the Acme Disposal charge of $2,400 triggered the new-vendor alert — you'd never used them before. Turned out it was a dumpster your site super ordered without a PO. Third, the Buildertrend pull showed the Henderson remodel framing budget was $3,200 over due to two untagged Home Depot runs that went through your main account instead of the job-specific card. Total spend for April was $78,200. Without the Buildertrend cross-reference, $8,900 of that would have sat in 'uncategorized' until your bookkeeper got to it in May. With the Runway Analysis app running in parallel, you could also see that April's cash position — after those vendor payments — left you with 2.4 months of runway at current burn, which told you to accelerate the AR call on the Riverside job before starting the next draw.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Vendor spend by trade category (framing, electrical, plumbing, materials, etc.) month-over-month — are your sub costs as a share of job revenue staying flat or creeping up?

Job cost variance by active project — which jobs have vendor payments running ahead of budget, broken out by trade?

New vendor alert rate — how many unrecognized payees hit your accounts each month? More than two or three usually means a process problem.

Recurring sub billing consistency — are your regular subs billing on expected cycles, or are there surprise invoices or gaps that signal a dispute you haven't caught yet?

Cash runway in months — given current vendor payment pace and AR, how many months can you cover payroll and subs without a new draw or invoice collection?

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

QuickBooks reports (exported to Excel)

QuickBooks has the data but the reports are built for accountants, not GCs — you still have to manually tag transactions by job, build your own pivot tables, and re-run everything when a late invoice comes in.

Buildertrend / CoConstruct job costing

Good for job-level cost tracking when your subs actually submit through the platform, but doesn't connect to your bank feeds or flag off-platform vendor charges — you're still blind to anything that hits your QuickBooks directly.

Hiring a part-time controller or bookkeeper

A good bookkeeper catches most of this, but you're paying $800–1,500/month for reports that are 2–3 weeks stale and still require you to interpret the numbers yourself.

Procore financials

Built for commercial GCs with dedicated finance staff — the setup cost and per-seat pricing make it impractical for a crew under 20, and it doesn't connect to your personal or business bank feeds the way Plaid does.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — transaction insights, runway analysis all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

My QuickBooks is a mess — transactions aren't tagged to jobs, categories are inconsistent. Will this still work?

Yes. Starch syncs your QuickBooks entity data — bills, invoices, vendor records, payments — on a schedule and can work with whatever categorization you have. You can tell Starch 'reclassify my transactions using these categories' and it applies your logic going forward. It won't retroactively fix your QuickBooks history, but the dashboard will reflect your actual data and you can clean up categories inside Starch without touching your books.

Does Starch connect to Buildertrend or CoConstruct directly?

Starch automates Buildertrend and CoConstruct through your browser — no API required. You give Starch your login credentials and it pulls job cost summaries, budget vs. actual reports, and subcontractor data the same way you'd log in and navigate the reports yourself. It's not as fast as a direct API sync, but it works with any version of either platform, including setups with custom fields.

What about sub invoices that come in as PDFs via email?

Starch syncs your Gmail or Outlook on a schedule and can read attachments. You can tell Starch: 'Scan incoming emails from my subcontractors for PDF invoices and extract the vendor name, invoice number, amount, and job reference — then match them against open bills in QuickBooks.' This is a custom automation you describe and Starch builds; it's not a pre-built app, but it's a first-class workflow.

Is my financial data stored by Starch? Is it secure?

Starch stores your synced QuickBooks and Plaid data in its database to power the scheduled-sync features. Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today — that's worth knowing if you have strict compliance requirements. For most small GC operations running on QuickBooks and a business checking account, the data handling is comparable to any cloud bookkeeping tool.

My QuickBooks has P&L and Transaction List reports I usually export. Will those work?

QuickBooks report views — P&L, Transaction List, Vendor Expenses — are temporarily disabled pending a connector fix. Entity-level data syncs normally: that means your individual bills, invoices, vendor records, and payments all come through fine. For most vendor spend analysis, the entity-level data is actually more useful than the report views anyway because you can slice it however you want instead of being stuck with QuickBooks' report format.

Can Starch help me track which subs have expired insurance certificates?

Yes, but it's a custom automation, not a pre-built app. Tell Starch: 'I keep sub COI documents in a Google Drive folder — scan them for expiration dates and send me a weekly alert listing any sub whose certificate expires in the next 30 days.' Starch connects to Google Drive from its integration catalog and the agent queries it live when the automation runs. You can also have it cross-reference against your active sub roster from QuickBooks or Buildertrend.