The standard construction finance stack for a small residential builder looks like this: project management in one tool, budget in a spreadsheet, receipts in a shoebox (metaphorical or literal), payroll in QuickBooks, subcontractor invoices in email. The accountant reconciles everything quarterly and finds errors from two months ago that are now impossible to correct cleanly.
This stack is so normal that most builders don't question it. It's how the industry has always worked. But it creates friction at every junction, introduces errors at every data transfer, and produces financial visibility that's always weeks behind reality.
The Job Costing Gap
QuickBooks is built for general ledger accounting. It handles your chart of accounts, your P&L, your bank reconciliation. What it doesn't have is any concept of phases, tasks, or project-level budget tracking at the granularity that construction requires.
You can create jobs in QuickBooks and assign expenses to them. But you can't create a phase-by-phase budget with baseline and current tracking. You can't run a report that shows Foundation Materials at 87% of budget with $2,400 in pending expenses. You can't flag when a subcontractor's invoices approach their estimate. Those are construction-specific concepts that accounting software wasn't designed for.
What BLT Handles
BLT covers the job costing and project finance layer: per-phase budgets with baseline tracking, expense categorization by project/phase/budget line, receipt OCR, labor cost integration, subcontractor invoice tracking, weekly settlement workflow, and the AI intelligence layer that monitors all of it.
It also handles light accounting functions: simple invoicing and draw requests, payment tracking against invoices, basic reporting (budget vs. actual, expense detail, vendor spend, cash flow summary), and CSV export for accountant handoff.
What It Doesn't Try to Handle
BLT is not a general ledger. It doesn't handle payroll tax filings, depreciation schedules, or chart of accounts management. It doesn't replace QuickBooks for the accountant's annual reporting needs. It's designed to be the project-level financial operating system, with clean data export that integrates with whatever accounting software the builder's accountant uses.
The Export Bridge
All financial data in BLT — expenses, settlements, labor costs, subcontractor payments — is exportable as CSV. The export format is designed to be importable into QuickBooks and Xero with minimal reformatting. The builder runs their project finances in BLT in real time. The accountant gets clean, organized data at whatever cadence they need. Nobody maintains a bridge spreadsheet.