Everything WIPKeep does, in plain English.
Built for contractors, the trades and small businesses that work job by job. No accounting background needed, and nothing hidden behind a demo call.
The short answer
WIPKeep turns a sentence like “paid Ferguson $412 for copper fittings for the Alvarez bathroom” into a proper double-entry bookkeeping entry, tagged to that job, and shows it to you in plain English before anything is saved. It adds job costing, subcontractor and 1099 tracking, receipts, loans and depreciation, and keeps your business and personal money apart. You approve every entry.
Setup is three things
- Set your fiscal year
- Start typing what happened
- Approve the drafts
Getting it in the books
Put in a day's costs without learning accounting
You type what happened the way you would text it. WIPKeep works out the double entry, then shows you what it understood before anything is saved.
- It tells you back what it heard
- Before you approve, WIPKeep restates the entry in plain English: "You're recording that you PAID $1,400 to Ramirez Electric, for Materials." If that sentence is wrong, the entry is wrong, and you reject it. That is the whole answer to "how do I know the AI understood me."
- Nothing posts until you say so
- Every entry waits for your approval. There is no background posting, no overnight sync, no schedule that runs without you.
- No chart of accounts to set up
- Accounts are created the first time you use them and categorized for you. The one thing you do set up front is your fiscal year.
- It asks when it is not sure
- Miss out who you paid and it stops and asks. Type something that might be settling a bill you already recorded and it asks whether to settle the bill or record a new expense, so you do not book the same cost twice.
Job costing
Know what each job actually made you
Costs you tag to a job are held on your balance sheet as work in progress instead of being dumped into this month's expenses. They are released against that job's revenue when you close it.
- Check a job's costs any time, in one click
- Click a job and see what it has absorbed so far, account by account, with the total and any customer deposits already received. That is the number you want before you price a change order or decide the job is done.
- Close it in one screen
- Pick the job, enter the sale price, say whether you invoiced the customer or already have the money, choose the customer or tap Walk-in, and add closing costs if there were any. WIPKeep records the sale, clears WIP to cost of goods sold, and applies any deposit so you only bill the balance.
- Closing costs know whether you paid or still owe
- Enter a realtor fee, an attorney bill or any other closing cost and WIPKeep asks whether you paid it now or still owe it, then tells you what will happen before you click: paid from Business Checking now, or recorded as a bill to pay later.
- Warranty work is its own kind of job
- Callbacks and post-sale work can be tracked as a warranty project against the original job, so a project's true bottom line stays true long after you handed over the keys.
- Closed it too soon? Reopen it
- A controlled reopen reverses the whole closing batch and puts the job back in progress. Nothing is deleted: the originals stay, flagged as reversed, and the reopen is written to your audit log.
Subcontractors and 1099s
Do not lose a subcontractor between now and January
The payment is the easy part. Remembering who you paid, nine months later, from a bank line that just says a card number, is the part that ruins a weekend.
- It stops and asks who you paid
- Record a payment without naming the sub and WIPKeep will not just file it away. If you genuinely do not know yet, say so and it lands on a Needs a Payee list you can clear later, instead of becoming a mystery you reconstruct from statements.
- One sub, three spellings, one total
- Pull the 1099 summary and payees are consolidated by tax ID, so the same person entered as Mike, Mike R and M. Ramirez Electric totals once instead of three times.
- Labor on a job still counts; materials do not
- A sub whose labor was costed into a job still shows up on their 1099. Materials, equipment and property purchases stay off it. That seam is where generic tools quietly under-report by an entire job.
- Honest about the limit
- The output is a summary to hand your tax preparer. WIPKeep does not e-file with the IRS.
Trucks, tools and equipment
Buy something big without guessing at the accounting
The truck, the trailer, the compressor, the leased lift. These are the entries small contractors get wrong most often, and getting them wrong shows up on your tax return.
- Small tools get expensed, not depreciated
- Bought a $400 nail gun? WIPKeep expenses it. Purchases under $2,500 are written off rather than capitalized, unless you specifically ask to depreciate them.
- Financed a truck? The payment is split for you
- WIPKeep records the asset at full cost, the down payment and the loan, then builds a monthly payment schedule with principal and interest already split, so you are not guessing which part is deductible. It will not proceed without the term and the rate. You generate and approve each month.
- Depreciation is a form, not a guess
- Enter the asset, its useful life in months and any salvage value, and WIPKeep builds a straight-line monthly schedule you can review, pause or cancel. It refuses to depreciate land or a leased asset, which is a mistake that double-counts an expense straight onto your return.
- Leases are handled as leases
- A leased asset gets its own liability rather than pretending you own it, with the payment and the amortization kept as separate, clean entries.
Your money vs the business's money
Keep business and personal apart without a second bank account
Solo owners mix money. That is normal, and it is where most small-business books go wrong. WIPKeep is built for it rather than scolding you about it.
- Groceries never land on the business books
- Inherently personal spending goes to a separate personal ledger and stays there. Your business profit and loss statement stays clean.
- Paid for the job out of your own pocket?
- The cost still belongs to the business, so WIPKeep records it and credits Owner's Capital. Miss these and you overstate your profit and lose the deduction.
- Took money out for yourself?
- That is an owner's draw, not an expense, and WIPKeep books it to the right equity account instead of quietly reducing your profit.
Proof
An audit trail that keeps the sentence you typed
Most software logs that a record changed. WIPKeep keeps the story: what you typed, what it asked you, what it warned you about, and what you approved.
- Your own words are part of the record
- The plain-English sentence you wrote is stored with the entry, along with any clarifying questions and every warning you were shown.
- Append-only, and exportable
- Entries are never edited in place. Corrections happen through linked reversing entries, and the whole log exports to CSV for your accountant.
- A closed year stays closed
- Once you close a fiscal year, entries dated inside it cannot be drafted, saved or reversed. The books stop moving under your filed return.
Reports
Statements your accountant will recognise
Real financial statements, not a pretty summary, produced from real double-entry books.
- The statements
- Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet (with the assets equals liabilities plus equity check shown), Cash Flow and T-accounts, plus per-project, vendor, unearned-revenue and warranty reports, with date and fiscal-year filters.
- Downloads, not dashboards
- Statements come out as Excel and PDF files you can send straight to your preparer or your lender. The home screen shows activity figures, entries recorded, active budgets, revenue this month, rather than live statements. We would rather say that plainly than imply a dashboard you will go looking for.
- Budgets and budget vs actual
- Set budgets for the business or per project, then watch how the year is really going against them.
Paperwork
Receipts, recurring bills and inventory
The rest of the week's admin, handled the same way: drafted, shown to you, approved by you.
- Attach the receipt to the entry
- Upload a PDF, JPEG or PNG and attach it to a saved transaction, so the paperwork lives with the number instead of in the glovebox.
- Recurring bills you generate and approve
- Rent, insurance, loan payments and subscriptions are lined up as schedules. Nothing posts on its own: you generate the month and approve it.
- Inventory that costs itself
- Weighted-average cost with cost of goods sold worked out as you sell, and a hard stop if you try to sell stock you do not have.
Nothing posts to your books unchecked.
These are hard-coded checks that run before an entry is saved, not the AI's opinion. Try to slip a mistake past it.
See it catch a mistake
- Debits must equal creditsTo the penny, or it won't save.
- Duplicate-payment heads-upBefore you pay a bill twice.
- Can't oversell inventoryBlocks a sale you don't have stock for.
- Reversal guardsNo reversing a reversal, no tangled unwinds.
- Deposits handled rightParked safely until the job is done.
You still approve every entry: the safety nets make it much harder for a bad one to slip through.
What WIPKeep does not do.
Read this as carefully as the rest. If two or more of these are must-haves, another tool is the better call today, and we would rather you knew now.
- No bank feeds. Every transaction is typed in by you. There is no automatic import.
- One user, one company. No seats for a partner or an office manager. Multi-entity is on a waitlist.
- No payroll, and no accounting or bank integrations.
- Completed-contract only. A job's revenue and costs are recognized when it closes. No percentage-of-completion, and no bonding-grade WIP schedule with over and under-billings.
- No retainage tracking, no AIA G702/G703 progress billing, and no CSI cost codes.
- Year-end close only. There is no month-end close. Individual jobs close whenever they finish.
- 1099s are a summary preview, not IRS e-filing.
- The AI can misread you. That is exactly why it shows you the entry in plain English and posts nothing without your approval.
Spend your evenings on the job,
not the books.
Real books you approve, with job costing built in and safety nets that catch trouble before it lands.
You approve every entry: nothing posts without you.
Start free: 25 AI prompts, no card. Paid plans start a 15-day trial that does require a card, cancel online anytime.