The Most Common (and Costly) Mistakes Builders Make
Learn how to avoid the most common construction accounting mistakes—from job costing errors to duplicate payments. Expert Melissa Leediker shares tips to help builders improve accuracy, reduce cost leaks, and run a more profitable business.
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In construction, the difference between a profitable year and a painful one often comes down to what’s happening in the back office. And more often than not, it’s the seemingly simple accounting mistakes—made daily, quietly—that eat into your margin without you even noticing.
We sat down with Melissa Leediker, founder of Turquant Builder Services, who’s spent the last five years deep in the financial trenches with custom home builders, remodelers, and construction teams across Texas. Her mission? Help them clean up their books, protect their profits, and finally get visibility into their numbers.
The biggest takeaway? Most builders are making the same three costly errors—and don’t even realize it.
The Three Mistakes
Melissa breaks it down simply:
- Costing expenses to the wrong job
- Costing to the wrong cost code
- Duplicated entries and payments
They sound straightforward. Maybe even obvious. But as Melissa explains, they’re incredibly common—especially for builders who are growing quickly or still relying on patchwork processes between the field and the office.
When “Good Enough” Isn’t Good Enough
“A lot of builders don’t even realize how messy their books are,” Melissa says. “They’re building great homes, they’ve got cash in the bank—but they can’t explain where the money went, or why a job went over budget.”
What starts as a missed receipt or miscategorized invoice often ends up buried in overhead—just to avoid the awkward conversation with a client or the hassle of hunting it down. But those decisions add up. Quickly.
And without consistent, real-time job costing, those inaccuracies snowball into bad estimating, missed revenue, and low-margin work. Builders aren’t just leaving money on the table—they’re making it harder to win the next job.
The Visibility Problem
The root of the problem isn’t just bad bookkeeping—it’s the lack of a system. Most builders don’t start their business because they love accounting. And once they start growing, that disorganization gets passed down, handed off, or outsourced… without fixing the core issue: there’s no consistent, scalable process for tracking what’s really happening financially.
This creates friction across the business:
- Field teams don’t code receipts properly (or at all)
- Bookkeepers guess or delay coding
- Project managers don’t get real-time numbers
- And leadership can’t trust their financials
So What’s the Fix?
Melissa shares some practical (and sometimes low-tech) solutions—like bracketing receipts in the truck or assigning a single person to manage cost code consistency. But she also points out the role of automation tools like Adaptive, especially when it comes to AI-assisted cost coding, flagging duplicate entries, and improving field-to-office workflows.
With tools that remember vendor patterns, auto-suggest cost codes, and flag duplicates before payments go out, it’s not just about saving time—it’s about avoiding expensive mistakes that kill your margin.
Final Thoughts
Whether you’re a fixed-price builder trying to protect margin or a cost-plus builder looking for tighter billing visibility, these issues affect everyone. And they only get harder to fix the longer you wait.
“You can’t scale a messy back office. Period,” Melissa says.
The good news? With a little attention to process—and the right tech to support it—these costly mistakes become entirely preventable.
