Finance & FP&A

How to build an annual operating budget as Construction and Contractor Founders

Finance & FP&AFor Construction and Contractor Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're building next year's budget in Excel, pulling QuickBooks exports by hand, and trying to remember which jobs had cost overruns because a sub billed twice for the same pour. Labor costs are buried in Paylocity, material costs are half in QuickBooks and half in credit card statements, and your equipment rental line is anyone's guess because half of it goes on a card the foreman carries. By February the budget is already wrong and you don't find out until QuickBooks shows a number you don't recognize. You don't have a controller. You have a spreadsheet and a lot of catch-up every quarter.

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Finance & FP&AFor Construction and Contractor Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live annual operating budget broken down by job type (residential, commercial, specialty trade), cost category (labor, materials, subs, equipment, overhead), and month — updated automatically from your QuickBooks and Plaid data without manual exports

Scenario views showing what happens to your margin and runway if lumber prices spike 15%, if a large job pushes to Q3, or if you add two crew members in April

A spending dashboard that flags when any vendor category — concrete delivery, dump fees, tool rentals — runs ahead of the budget line you set for the year

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

Budgeting Scenario Analysis Transaction Insights

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule — invoices, bills, vendor payments, and journal entries — and syncs your bank and card transactions from Plaid on a schedule. If you use Buildertrend, CoConstruct, or a similar field management tool, Starch automates those through your browser — no API needed — to pull job-level cost-to-date and change order totals. Paylocity or ADP payroll data syncs on a schedule if connected. All three apps draw from the same live data pool so your budget, scenarios, and spending alerts stay in sync.

Prompts to copy

Build me an annual operating budget broken down by job category (residential remodel, new construction, commercial TI) and cost type (direct labor, subcontractors, materials, equipment rental, permits, overhead). Pull actual spending from QuickBooks and Plaid, show variance against budget by month, and flag any line that's more than 10% over.

Create a scenario that shows what happens to my runway and monthly burn if lumber and concrete costs go up 12% in Q2 and my largest job — a $480k residential build — pushes its final draw to September instead of June.

Show me every transaction from my Plaid-connected accounts in the last 12 months, grouped by construction cost category. Flag any vendor that billed more than twice in a 30-day window, any charge over $5,000 that didn't appear in the same month last year, and any new vendor that's hit my account in the last 60 days.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks to Starch — Starch syncs your chart of accounts, all open and closed invoices, bills, vendor payments, and journal entries on a schedule. This becomes the backbone of every budget line.

2 Connect your business bank accounts and cards through Plaid — Starch syncs transactions and balances on a schedule, categorized automatically. This catches any spend that never made it into QuickBooks because the foreman put it on a card.

3 If you use Buildertrend, CoConstruct, or Procore, tell Starch which site to log into. Starch automates through your browser to pull job cost summaries, approved change orders, and percent-complete by project — no API needed.

4 Open the Budgeting app and describe your budget structure: job types you run, cost categories that matter (direct labor, subs, materials, equipment rental, permits, insurance, overhead), and the fiscal year you're planning. Starch pulls your last 12 months of actuals from QuickBooks and Plaid to suggest starting allocations.

5 Review the suggested allocations by category. Adjust for known changes — a new crew member starting in March, a big commercial job that front-loads material spend in Q1, or a sub you're dropping. Type the adjustment in plain English and Starch updates the line.

6 Set variance thresholds for each major cost category — for example, 'alert me if subcontractor costs run more than 8% over budget in any month' — and Starch will flag those automatically as the year progresses.

7 Open the Scenario Analysis app and build your downside case: what does the year look like if your largest residential job slips a draw, materials run hot, or you lose a bid you were counting on? Starch uses your actual Plaid and QuickBooks baseline, so you're adjusting real numbers, not hypotheticals.

8 Build a second scenario for your growth case — adding a second crew, taking on a commercial sub-contract, or raising your GC fee by two points — so you have both sides of the decision visible before you commit.

9 Open the Transaction Insights app and run it against the last 12 months to audit your actual spending patterns. Look for recurring charges you forgot about, vendors who billed inconsistently, and cost categories where your QuickBooks coding doesn't match what Plaid shows.

10 Use the Transaction Insights anomaly flags to clean up your budget assumptions — if dump fees ran $3,200 last year but you only budgeted $1,500, update the line now before the year starts instead of explaining the variance in October.

11 Set up a monthly check-in automation: tell Starch to pull your month-end actuals from QuickBooks and Plaid, compare them to your annual budget by category, and send you a summary with any line over threshold — so you catch overruns in month two, not month eight.

12 Share the budget view with your bookkeeper or accountant by pointing them to the Starch dashboard — no spreadsheet export, no emailing a file, no version control problem.

See this running on Starch

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

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Worked example

2026 Annual Budget — Ridgeline Contracting (8-person GC, residential + light commercial)

Sample numbers from a real run

Direct Labor (W-2 crew, 6 FTE)	384,000
Subcontractors (electrical, plumbing, HVAC)	210,000
Materials (lumber, concrete, finish)	175,000
Equipment Rental	38,000
Permits and Inspections	22,000
Subcontractor Insurance / COI tracking	8,500
Fuel and Vehicle	19,000
Overhead (office, software, owner draw)	94,000
Contingency (5% of direct cost)	40,000
Projected Gross Revenue	1,240,000

Ridgeline runs four to six residential remodels and two commercial tenant improvement jobs in parallel. Their QuickBooks had labor coded three different ways depending on who did the entry, and equipment rental was split between a company card in Plaid and checks logged in QuickBooks — so the real number was invisible until Starch pulled both and reconciled them at $38,000, not the $24,000 the owner thought. The scenario that mattered most: their biggest job, a $320,000 kitchen-and-addition remodel, has a history of draw delays. Starch modeled a 60-day slip on the final $85,000 draw and showed that without a $40,000 line of credit or a faster close on a smaller job, payroll in August gets tight. That one scenario changed how the owner structured the contract on the next job — milestone draws instead of completion draws. The budget now lives in Starch, reconciles against QuickBooks and Plaid every week, and the owner gets a one-page variance report every Monday morning instead of finding out about overruns during the quarterly tax prep call.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Gross margin by job type (residential remodel vs. new construction vs. commercial TI) — not blended, because the mix is what determines whether the year is profitable

Subcontractor cost as a percentage of job revenue — the line that blows up most often when change orders aren't captured

Monthly AR vs. next-month payroll coverage — the number that tells you whether you're actually solvent or just busy

Budget variance by cost category month-to-date — especially materials and equipment rental, which drift fastest

Overhead as a percentage of revenue — the number that tells you whether the business is scaling or just adding cost

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Excel or Google Sheets budget

Costs you two to four hours every month to update manually from QuickBooks exports, goes stale the moment a bill posts, and has no anomaly detection — you find the overrun when you're already past it.

QuickBooks budgeting module

Lives inside QuickBooks so it's only as good as your coding discipline, doesn't pull Plaid card transactions, can't model scenarios, and gives you no job-type breakdown unless your chart of accounts is already perfectly structured.

Buildertrend or CoConstruct built-in budget

Great for job-level cost-to-complete but doesn't consolidate across jobs into a company-wide annual operating budget, and has no connection to your bank or payroll data.

Hiring a part-time controller or bookkeeper for budget work

Runs $2,000–$4,000/month for someone who still needs you to pull the data together and explain the job structure — and you wait a week for an answer when you need to make a hiring decision today.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — quarterly budgeting, scenario planning, transaction insights 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 — accounts miscoded, duplicate vendors, labor split across multiple categories. Will Starch still work?

Yes, but your budget will reflect the mess until you clean it up. Starch pulls what's in QuickBooks as-is — it doesn't recode your chart of accounts. What it does do is show you the discrepancies clearly: when Plaid shows $38k in equipment-related charges and QuickBooks shows $24k, that gap is visible immediately. Most Ridgeline-style operators find the first budget build is also a QuickBooks audit. That's a feature, not a problem.

Does Starch connect to Buildertrend or CoConstruct directly?

Starch automates Buildertrend and CoConstruct through your browser — no API needed. You give Starch your login and tell it which reports or job summaries to pull, and it navigates the site the same way you would. This means job cost-to-date, approved change orders, and percent-complete can feed into your operating budget even though neither platform has a formal integration in Starch's catalog.

What if I use a card the foreman carries for job site purchases? That spend never hits QuickBooks on time.

That's exactly what the Plaid connection handles. Starch syncs all transactions from connected bank and card accounts on a schedule — so the foreman's card charges show up in your spending dashboard and budget variance reports whether or not they've been entered into QuickBooks yet. You'll see the gap between the two, which is itself useful information.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? My accountant asked.

Not yet. Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If that's a hard requirement for your business or your accountant, it's worth knowing upfront. It's on the roadmap.

The Budgeting app says it's in beta. Can I still use it?

The Budgeting app is currently in development — you can request beta access and get notified when it launches. In the meantime, you can build a custom budget app by describing your exact structure to Starch: job types, cost categories, variance thresholds, and data sources. Starch builds the surface from your description, and you can refine it from there. The Scenario Analysis and Transaction Insights apps are live today and cover a lot of the same ground.

Can Starch pull my QuickBooks P&L report directly?

QuickBooks report views — including the standard P&L, Transaction List, and Vendor Expenses reports — are temporarily unavailable due to an upstream connector issue. Entity-level data syncs normally: invoices, bills, vendor payments, journal entries. Starch uses that entity-level data to construct budget comparisons and variance analysis, so the budget functionality works — you just won't see a pre-packaged P&L pull until the report views are restored.

I want to budget by job, not just by category. Can Starch do that?

Yes. Tell Starch: 'Build me a budget that tracks revenue, labor, sub costs, and materials by individual job, and shows me whether each job is running ahead or behind the original estimate.' If your job names exist in QuickBooks as classes or customers, Starch pulls them. If they're only in Buildertrend, Starch pulls them via browser automation. You can have both a company-wide annual operating budget and a job-level cost view — they're just two surfaces built on the same data.