Itemized Invoices for Rehabs (Contractor v Tax Accountant)

[Zoabe Hafeez]

Hi All - my new tax accountant is recommending that all future rehab jobs have a line-by-line itemized estimate for her purposes.  I ran this by both my mentor and one of my contractors and they pushed back saying that it a very difficult and time consuming thing to do, but did say he can do categories (kitchen, living room, roof, etc).  What do all of y'all do?  How important is this from a tax/accounting perspective?  Thanks! In Houston, TX btw.

[Cody L.]

Why is that needed?

If I buy a house for $200k. Pay a contractor $50k to fix it up. Sell it for $310k. I just made $60k

why the **%* does the contractors invoice need to be broken down for the benifit of the IRS?  if you, as the customer want a breakdown then the contractor can decide if it’s worth him doing for the expect profit. If not, he can pass on the project or counter 

drives me nuts how invasive we’ve allowed our government to become. I’m more and more convinced that a simple VAT tax is the way to go. So long as we tax “income” we’ll always have a fat bloated pig like organization to determine what everyone’s “income” is (that isn’t a W2 worker bee)