Authored by Baker Tilly’s Nick Brorson
Unpredictable supply chains, multiplying compliance requirements and a shrinking labor pool of experienced accounting talent. These are just some of the many challenges facing the construction industry in 2026. To thrive in the next decade, construction finance transformation will be essential as finance teams evolve into growth drivers, not just cost centers.
To prepare for the next decade, high performing construction teams are sharpening their skills and modernizing their tech stack. Below is a look at five construction finance priorities that are consistently rising to the top for contractors around the world.
1. Equip your team with the tools that attract and retain top talent
Finance teams want to do meaningful work — not spend their days re-keying invoices, stitching spreadsheets together or navigating workarounds that only make sense to the one person who built them.
Younger finance professionals especially expect cloud access, workflow automation and real-time reporting. When they’ve used tools like Sage Intacct in previous roles, they immediately recognize the opportunity cost of operating without them. AP professionals, in particular, feel the strain of manual processes. According to the Institute of Finance and Management’s 2025 Accounts Payable Career Satisfaction Report, AP professionals say they’re being asked to produce more detailed reporting and analysis, but their time is bogged down by manual data entry and error handling, leading to poor job satisfaction and an unsustainable work-life balance. [1]
Modern tools aren’t just a technology upgrade — they’re an essential part of competing for (and keeping) skilled construction accounting talent.
2. Stop profit leaks before they compound
The biggest threats to your margin aren’t large, dramatic events — they’re the small, repeated losses embedded in your day-to-day financial workflows.
Common construction finance challenges that erode profits include:
- Missed or delayed change orders
- Incorrect retainage tracking
- Billing sequence errors that delay payment
- Inconsistent documentation for substantiated billing
These issues often stem from manual work, disconnected systems or processes built around Excel. For example, contractors frequently lose retainage simply because no one is tracking release dates in a centralized system.
Similarly, when AIA billing is done manually, a single skipped invoice can force teams to rebuild the entire sequence — introducing delays that affect cash flow. Sage Intacct Construction eliminates these risks with automated retainage, contract-based billing and the ability to insert missing AIA invoices while automatically recalculating the entire sequence.
3. Use real data to forecast and evaluate which projects to pursue
Construction leaders routinely make decisions about whether to bid, which projects to prioritize and how to allocate capital. Those decisions depend on financial data that is both current and reliable.
When job costs are spread across multiple spreadsheets or systems without construction-specific reporting, forecasting becomes slow and imprecise. Project managers may rely on instinct rather than actual performance trends, making it difficult to evaluate the profitability of certain project types, geographic regions or delivery methods. One bad bet can be devastating.
Sage Intacct’s Construction dimensional reporting — a capability that allows up to 10 levels of cost drill-down — gives finance teams and executives the ability to analyze jobs by entity, customer, location, cost type, crew, project manager or any other relevant dimension.
With clear visibility into patterns across jobs, leaders can make decisions about which opportunities to pursue and which to decline with confidence, and avoid taking on projects they don’t have the capacity (or cash flow) for.
4. Strengthen cash flow through faster, more accurate billing
Even highly profitable jobs create cash strain when billing is slow, inaccurate or overly manual. For many contractors, billing delays stem from:
Manually assembling AIA or Time & Materials (T&M) invoices
- Searching for backup documentation
- Re-creating invoice formats to match vendor or owner requirements
- Using Excel to manage progressive billing or retainage
- Relying on email chains to verify costs
Sage Intacct streamlines these processes end-to-end. Its construction-specific billing engine automates retainage, progressive billing and T&M documentation. Contractors can attach receipts, timesheets and supporting documents directly to invoices.
When billing is accurate on the first submission and supported by consistent documentation, payments move faster, disputes decrease and cash flow becomes more predictable.
5. Track productivity to identify your most profitable niche
Every contractor has a sweet spot: the work that delivers the strongest margins with the least friction. But many companies don’t have the data to figure out what the sweet spot actually is.
Productivity reporting changes that. By comparing estimated productivity against actual crew output, contractors can see in real time where labor hours are diverging and why.
Over time, this data provides clarity on which project types routinely outperform expectations and which consistently absorb more labor than estimated. Patterns in crew mix, material usage and production rates become visible, helping contractors refine their estimating, rebalance workloads and pursue the work that aligns best with their strengths.
Sage Intacct is set up to make productivity tracking simple and effective. Building a culture around productivity tracking will equip your operations team with invaluable insights.
Build a finance function that can scale
Achieving all five of these capabilities requires a finance system that can support them. Sage Intacct makes it possible to execute these priorities consistently and at scale.
If your team isn’t on Sage Intacct yet, the most productive first step in 2026 is to evaluate how your current system supports — or limits — these five capabilities.
For each priority, ask:
- Can we do this today?
- Can we do it consistently, without workarounds?
- Can we do it in real time?
- Can we do it without adding headcount?
If the answer to most of those questions is “no,” Sage Intacct becomes the natural foundation for your next decade of growth. Once the platform is in place, your team gains the structure, automation and data quality needed to build each capability intentionally — rather than forcing progress through spreadsheets or manual effort.
For teams planning ahead for their 2026 budget, the first actionable step is simple: map your current processes against these five capabilities and identify where Sage Intacct would remove the most friction.
Baker Tilly’s construction advisory team helps finance leaders work through this assessment, clarify where Sage Intacct will deliver the strongest return and build a realistic road map for implementing the capabilities that matter most. By anchoring your 2026 plan in this kind of structured evaluation, you can confidently build a finance function that’s ready for the decade ahead.
Interested in learning more? Schedule a business assessment with a Baker Tilly specialist.
Sources
[1] 2025 Accounts Payable Career Satisfaction Report
