The QuickBooks alternative built for contractors.
QuickBooks was built for accountants. billWright is the back office a working steel contractor built for the trades: native change orders, retainage, progress billing, and real job costing, on top of estimating, crew time, and one-click invoicing. Coming from QuickBooks? A one-click importer brings your data over, free.
Free through the beta. Founding testers lock in founder pricing for life. Your data is yours - export it any time.
QuickBooks does the books. It doesn’t run the job.
QuickBooks is fine for a coffee shop. On a construction job it falls apart in specific, expensive ways - and you end up duct-taping it with classes, tags, add-ons, and a pile of spreadsheets.
Change orders & retainage
QuickBooks has no real concept of either. You bolt them on with memos and workarounds and hope the math holds at the end of the job. billWright tracks change orders against the job and holds retainage where it belongs.
Job costing that never answers
Classes and tags are not job costing, and the cleaner version is reserved for higher tiers. Most contractors still cannot see true profit per job. billWright ties every estimate, crew hour, and receipt to the job.
Progress & AIA billing
Progress billing and AIA-style draws are not in the box, so you export to a spreadsheet to bill a schedule of values. billWright bills a week of work or a draw without leaving the app.
Not built for the field
No job-site estimating, no crew punch clock, no geotagged field photos. You manage the actual work in a second app and reconcile it by hand.
Add-ons and yearly hikes
Payroll, time tracking, and payments each cost extra, and the subscription climbs every year whether your shop grew or not.
Your data, locked in
Getting a clean, complete export out of QuickBooks is painful by design. billWright exports everything to CSV or JSON in one click - leaving is never held against you.
Bring your QuickBooks data with you.
The thing that keeps most contractors stuck on QuickBooks is the fear of moving. billWright has a one-click QuickBooks importer built in, so the switch does not mean a data-entry weekend.
One-click import
Point the importer at your QuickBooks export and it brings your chart of accounts and vendors straight across, free.
Safe by design
The import commits as a single transaction with a 24-hour undo, so a bad file can never quietly corrupt your books.
Start running the job
Your accounts and vendors are in place, so you can estimate, invoice, and job-cost from day one - no re-keying your setup by hand.
The importer brings your chart of accounts and vendors over today; the rest of your setup takes minutes, not a weekend.
billWright vs QuickBooks, for a contractor.
The same money in and out, plus everything QuickBooks makes you buy, bolt on, or fake with a spreadsheet.
| For your shop | billWright | QuickBooks |
|---|---|---|
| Change orders tracked against the job | Built in | Memos & workarounds |
| Retainage held and released | Built in | Manual, error-prone |
| Progress / AIA-style billing | Built in | Export to a spreadsheet |
| Profit per job / job costing | Built in | Limited, higher tiers |
| Estimate from your own material, parts & labor rates | Built in - calculators + price book | Add-on or spreadsheet |
| Crew clocks in from a phone | Built in - PIN punch app | Paid add-on (Time) |
| Invoice a week of work in one click | Yes - straight from approved time | Manual entry |
| Bring your QuickBooks data over | One-click importer, free | Not applicable |
| Export everything, anytime | One-click CSV / JSON | Painful by design |
| Price | Free through the beta, founder pricing locked after | Climbs yearly |
Also weighing Jobber, ServiceTitan, or Buildertrend? See the full comparison.
Built by a working contractor, not a software company.
billWright is built by Diego Freitas-Bell, who runs FeC Ironworks, a working steel erector and fabricator. He got fed up running the shop on QuickBooks plus a stack of apps that never fit, so he built the back office he needed. Every contractor feature exists because a real job needed it - that is why the change-order, retainage, and job-costing pieces QuickBooks fakes are native here. Read the founder story.
QuickBooks for contractors, answered.
Is there a QuickBooks alternative built for contractors?
Yes. billWright is back-office software built by a working contractor specifically for the trades. It handles the parts QuickBooks does not - change orders, retainage, progress and AIA-style billing, and real job costing - alongside estimating, crew time, invoicing, and a full set of books. It is free through the closed beta.
Can I import my QuickBooks data into billWright?
Yes. A one-click QuickBooks importer brings your chart of accounts and vendors straight across, free. The import commits as a single transaction with a 24-hour undo, so a bad file cannot quietly corrupt your books, and you are not stuck re-keying your setup by hand.
Does QuickBooks do job costing for construction?
Only loosely. QuickBooks leans on classes and tags and reserves cleaner job costing for higher tiers, so most contractors still cannot see true profit per job. billWright ties every estimate, crew hour, and receipt to the job, so profit per job is built in, not a workaround.
How much does billWright cost compared to QuickBooks?
billWright is free for the duration of the closed beta, and founding testers lock in founder pricing for life. There is no per-seat surprise and no yearly hike, and you can export everything to CSV or JSON any time. QuickBooks charges per add-on and climbs every year.
Get off QuickBooks. Keep your data.
Built by a working contractor, answering to the people who use it - not a board chasing a quarterly number. Free through the beta, founder pricing locked for life.
Prefer email? hello@billwright.app