NEW YORK, Sept. 24, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Trayd, the back-office operating system built for construction, has announced the launch of Trayd Accounting, bringing accounting and financial operations into the same platform contractors already use to run payroll and manage their workforce.
Construction accounting has run on broadly the same architecture for forty years: a general ledger that treats the job as a line item, not a system built to understand the job itself. The systems most contractors use today were built to exist on a server in a back office, before the cloud and long before AI, and designed around a specialist who could produce a report when asked. In an industry where labor accounts for roughly 70 percent of a contractor's costs and margins are measured in low single digits, that has meant running a business on numbers that are already weeks old.
“I've spoken to thousands of construction back offices and the same problem comes up again and again. They're flying blind, because the tools that held the answers required a specialist to run them while everyone else waited on a report,” said Anna Berger, co-founder and CEO of Trayd.
The difference shows up in the work a finance team does every month: producing statements for a bank when a line of credit is up for renewal, closing the month and filing sales tax on time, and getting the invoice out on a four-million-dollar job as soon as the work is completed.
Trayd Accounting is built around job profitability. Labor, material and equipment costs post to the general ledger as they are incurred and break out by project, employee, department and task code, so an owner can see a job's real margin while the work is still running rather than at close-out, when there is nothing left to do about it.
Work-in-progress (WIP) reporting shows over- and underbilled position across every job, the earliest signal that a project is drifting. AIA and time-and-materials billing, accounts payable and financial statements run in the same system, with AI-enabled workflows coding contracts, purchase orders and vendor invoices to the right project and line item.
“Legacy platforms failed to keep pace, so contractors added point solutions to fill the gaps. More software doesn't mean more visibility, it means less,” Berger said. “This is about giving contractors back what the industry lost forty years ago, a single source of truth: one place where the numbers live, and the ability to decide exactly who on your team gets to see them.”
The shift is already underway as contractors have begun to transition off their legacy systems in favor of modern cloud infrastructure. Because Trayd starts from the job instead of the ledger, owners, project managers, and accountants can each work directly in the same system, not from reports translated for them by a system specialist. This allows project managers to verify true margins before bidding new work, while giving owners the visibility to catch money-losing jobs while there is still time to fix them.
“Construction hasn't lagged because the industry resisted technology. The data was never structured, and a paper timesheet cannot be queried,” said Cara Kessler, co-founder and CTO of Trayd. “Legacy accounting software didn’t help, it started from a general ledger, not the job, so it never spoke the language the business operates from. Capture data at the source, in one system instead of five, and you get a financial operating system built on what actually happened rather than what somebody re-entered a week later.”
“Construction is at an inflection point. Rising costs, persistent labor shortages and increasing complexity make it more important than ever for contractors to understand how their businesses are performing,” said John F. Fish, Chairman and CEO of Suffolk and General Partner of Suffolk Technologies, an investor in Trayd. “The industry cannot build the future with systems designed for the past. Trayd is creating the dedicated technology infrastructure contractors need to connect their people, projects and financials, and we are excited to support its continued growth.”
Among the first contractors using the platform are Ostrow Electric, a third-generation union electrical contractor in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Prickel Electric, a women-owned electrical contractor in Verona, Kentucky, licensed across Kentucky, Ohio and North Carolina.
“We used the same on-premise accounting system for 27 years because it worked, and we weren’t looking to change for the sake of changing,” said Sam Ostrow, Vice President of Ostrow Electric.“But I'm the third generation here, and my job is to make the right call for the 200 people who work here today. Once we saw what was possible with payroll, job costs and accounting finally working together, the value became obvious. It feels a lot more like 2026 than 1999.”
“QuickBooks always had us looking backward. By the time everything was entered and reconciled, we were making decisions based on numbers that were already two weeks old," said Lendyn Prickel, Chief Financial Officer at Prickel Electric. "Where we lose efficiency on jobs is people not knowing where we stand, and before I came on board, nobody here was tracking that. Our software simply couldn't give us that detail. That's why Trayd’s WIP is going to be huge for us in catching issues earlier and making better decisions. I'd recommend Trayd Accounting to anyone in construction.”
Trayd works with contractors running with up to 2,500 field employees across union and open-shop operations in multiple states. Since launch, Trayd has reduced average weekly payroll processing time from 14 hours to 27 minutes. Implementation of the accounting module takes eight weeks.
Trayd Accounting is generally available to contractors across the United States. Trayd continues to integrate with major accounting and legacy systems for contractors who prefer to keep their legacy ERPs in place. To learn more or book a demo, visit buildtrayd.com.
About Trayd
Trayd is the back-office operating system focused on payroll, compliance and accounting, purpose-built for construction. Founded in 2021 by CEO Anna Berger, who grew up in a construction family, and CTO Cara Kessler, formerly of LinkedIn, the New York-based company gives contractors a single source of truth across payroll, HR, scheduling, field labor tracking and accounting, replacing the disconnected desktop systems the industry has relied on for decades. Trayd handles the union rules, prevailing wage requirements, certified payroll and multi-state tax obligations that break conventional software. Backed by White Star Capital, Suffolk Technologies, Y Combinator and RXR, the company has raised $15 million to date, including a $10 million Series A in 2026.
For more information, visit buildtrayd.com.
Media Contact:
Layla Van Buren
The MicDrop Agency
layla@themicdropagency.com
