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Ontario

Running a construction business in Ontario

The day itself, once the work is won and before the money is in. Every job on one board, a morning screen that says what needs a decision today, giving a crew access without handing over your password, and doing the admin by replying to an email from the truck.

Try this on a real business

Open a seeded business in your trade. Nine jobs on the pipeline, a quote sent and viewed, a deposit paid, an invoice overdue, and a holdback on the current month.

Open the demo business

No card, no form. Sign in later and everything you built stays on the same account.

15 guides on this

How to run the businessAssumptions you can defendEvery argument about a quote is two people remembering a conversation. Two short paragraphs on the quote itself, scope and exclusions, turn that into a comparison of documents.How to run the businessEvery job on one boardAsk a contractor what they are chasing and you get three jobs and a pause. The pause is where a quote sits for five weeks. One board with the money on each column, and a fifteen minute weekly habit.How to run the businessTeam accessWhat would fix a contractor’s admin is almost never a feature. It is a person: a bookkeeper, an office manager, a partner who already does the invoicing. Three roles, an email address, and an accountant export that means they never need a login at all.How to run the businessSole prop or incorporateThree paths priced on one screen: $100 for an Ontario sole proprietorship, $400 for an Ontario corporation, $300 federal, with the government filing fees inside each number. Fill the whole registration in, right to the review screen, before any account is needed.How to run the businessAdmin by emailLogging in to answer a one line question costs more than the question is worth, so it waits until night. Your business has an email address: ask it what is outstanding and the answer comes back with your own invoices, jobs and calls in it.How to run the businessFirst public bidPublic work is not harder work, it is work with a filing cabinet attached. See what is actually open with closing dates, then find you already hold a controlled document library with the company profile and prequalification package in it.How to run the businessBring your businessYou registered something, started charging, got work. Then a builder asked for a certificate you did not have. Drop your documents in, have the numbers read out of them, and land on a compliance checklist with what you already satisfy already ticked.How to run the businessKnow if they read itAn evening on a price, then silence, and no way to tell whether it landed in spam or was read and rejected. Send the proposal as a page instead of an attachment and it reports back: what they read, for how long, and what they skipped.How to run the businessOne screen every morningThe worst part of running a contracting business is the twenty minutes before the work, spent reconstructing what happened yesterday. A briefing written each morning from your own invoices, deals and books, ranked so the top card is the one that matters.How to run the businessRun it from ClaudeBy year three the estimating has become the job and the billing waits for Saturday. Connect AEC Stack to Claude and the errands around the estimate happen by asking, from the van, with nothing changed until you confirm it.How to run the businessBrand, website, documentsThe decision takes a sentence. The admin that follows takes a fortnight: a logo, a colour picked in a hurry, a website that never gets finished, and documents written the night before a builder asks for them. One press produces all three, in one brand.After you qualifyBid ReadinessPrequalification packages, bid documents, bonding, estimating, and how construction companies actually get work.How to run the businessWhat an hour costs youThe wage is roughly half what a worker costs. Add the employer side, the truck, the tools and the insurance, divide it across the hours you can actually invoice, and get a floor under your rate before the quote goes out.How to run the businessThe bid-ready checklistIncorporating is the starting gun, not the finish line. Ten stages generated for your trade, the next three things to do at the top, and a percentage that moves for the right reasons.How to run the businessOne place, not five toolsContractors build their own spreadsheets because every app was missing the thing that makes construction different, and because a monthly bill for something that still needs a workaround is infuriating. Holdback, per-job profit and the T5018, in one place, with no monthly bill.

The rest of the Ontario library

Finding construction work in OntarioBidding and prequalification in OntarioPricing construction work in OntarioChange orders and extras in OntarioGetting paid on Ontario constructionConstruction holdback in OntarioConstruction liens in OntarioHST for Ontario contractors
Every guideThe whole Ontario libraryHow to run the business