They are holding ten percent and I do not know what that adds up to.
That is your profit, sitting in someone else’s account, on a release schedule you have not been told. Across four contracts it is usually a bigger number than the owner guesses.
For subcontractors working under GCs
The paperwork is not the general contractor being difficult.
Retainage, pay applications, change orders and prequalification all arrive at once when you start taking work under real general contractors. It reads as administration. It is actually where your margin is going, and none of it is visible in books built to produce a tax return.
Six sentences
If you have said any of these, you already know where the problem is
Each one sounds like a paperwork complaint, or a people problem. Each one is a number. That gap is the whole of it, and it is why this stops being annoying and starts being expensive.
My pay app got rejected and I lost thirty days.
A G702 that does not tie to the schedule of values comes back, and the next billing window is a month away. You financed that month out of your own working capital.
I did the extra work, they never sent the change order, and now nobody wants to talk about it.
Work performed against an unapproved change order is cost with no revenue behind it. If it is not logged as performed and unapproved the day it happens, it quietly becomes a gift.
They want three years of financials and a WIP schedule. I do not have a WIP schedule.
That is a prequal packet coming back short, and it is the point where paperwork stops being annoying and starts deciding which jobs you are allowed to bid.
I have to call them about money, and then I am on their job again on Monday.
So the call goes out late, or it goes out annoyed, or it does not go out. Every week it slips is a week of your money funding somebody else’s job, and the conversation you eventually have is worse than the one you could have had on day two.
I need a current certificate off him and he has been on my crew for six years.
That is a document a workers comp audit turns on, sitting behind a friendship. An undocumented sub gets picked up in your exposure base, and the person who has to decide whether to push is you.
When it starts to matter
It’s not about how big you are
None of this is about crew size or revenue. It’s about the kind of work you have started taking, and it usually arrives all at once rather than gradually.
- Your first contract with retainage on it
- Your first AIA pay application
- A prequal packet that came back short
- Your first public job, and the certified payroll that arrives with it
- The first time a general contractor asks you to bond
Any one of these changes what your books have to do. If none of them has happened yet, you probably do not need us, and that is a legitimate answer.
What we run
The reporting a general contractor asks for, and the calls that come with it
The same discipline the bonded contractors on our book run, at the scope you are at now. The catalog does not change as you grow. The amount of it you need does. Some of it is a document. Some of it is a conversation you should not be the one having.
G702 and G703 that tie to the schedule of values
Pay applications built from the same numbers your books hold, in the format the general contractor expects, so they stop coming back. The schedule of values is maintained rather than rebuilt each cycle.
Retainage tracked by contract
Aged by contract, receivable and payable, and reported separately from current accounts receivable. You know what is being held, on which job, and when it is due to land.
Change orders logged as performed and unapproved
The moment work goes ahead without paperwork behind it, it exists as a tracked position rather than a conversation someone has to remember. That is the difference between negotiating from a record and negotiating from memory.
Insurance certificate and lien waiver tracking
The documents that stall a pay application are collected and kept current, so payment is held up by the work rather than by a lapsed certificate nobody was watching.
Certified payroll when you pick up public work
WH-347 and the state equivalents, on the cadence each contract requires, with prevailing wage determinations tracked by trade and locality. This arrives the first time you take a public job, usually with no warning.
Books that survive a prequal packet
Accrual books alongside the cash basis your return needs, a chart of accounts structured for job reporting rather than for a tax form, and a work-in-progress schedule that exists before somebody asks for it.
And the part that is not paperwork
We deal with the general contractor’s accounting department
Pay applications, aging, short payments and the question of where a check has got to come to us and get answered by us, in their format and on their cycle. You are not the one calling about money on Friday and standing on their job on Monday. What you have with the general contractor stays about the work.
The document requests do not come from you
W-9s, insurance certificates and lien waivers get asked for by us rather than by you, which is a different conversation and a much easier one to have twice. “Ask the office, they handle that” is a complete answer, and it works on a sub who has been on your crew for six years.
What the engagement is, and where a subcontractor usually starts
Core runs underneath every engagement: the books, AP, AR, job costing, and one report a month that says where you actually stand. The three above it are not sizes and you do not work through them in order. What usually arrives first at this stage is Compliance, because that is where certified payroll and the subcontractor file sit. WIP and Bonding is the one that matters the first time a general contractor asks you to bond, which may be a while away or may be next month.
Always on
Core
Books, AP, AR, job costing. Always on, at every level.
- Bookkeeping and reconciliation: accrual books maintained alongside cash basis for tax, monthly close, and a chart of accounts structured for job reporting
- Accounts payable: bill entry, payment scheduling, 1099 vendor tracking
- Accounts receivable: invoicing, aging, collections follow-up
- Job costing: labor, material, equipment and burden coded to the job
Accounts receivable is optional. Plenty of contractors invoice themselves and would rather keep it that way, so we scope it in or out rather than assuming.
The monthly deliverable
Contractor Position Page
One page, every month, and the same four questions answered every time. It is the difference between books that record what happened and a report you can run the business from.
- Percent complete and over/under billings
- Retainage position by contract
- Contract margin against estimate
- Cash against profit
Delivered by the eighth business day, walked on a quarterly call.
Then one of three, depending on what is actually binding
Most contractors recognise themselves in one of these immediately. You are not picking a size, you are naming the constraint, and the modules follow from it.
Compliance
The books tie to your contracts, and the sub file survives an audit.
- You pay subs and the documentation is behind
- A workers comp or general liability audit is coming
- You carry certified payroll or prevailing wage on public work
- Nobody can tell you what a job cost until it closes
Core, plus
Compliance
WIP & Bonding
The schedule your surety reads, and margin you can still do something about.
- Bonding capacity is limiting what you can bid
- Retainage and progress billing on your contracts
- You want fade visible at 40 percent complete, not at closeout
- Your surety or your agent is asking for a current schedule
Core, plus
GrowthProtection
CFO
Budget, forecast, and the big calls modeled before you commit to them.
- A contract materially larger than anything you have run before
- Multiple entities, or payroll in more than one state
- A lender with covenants you are measured against
- An exit or succession horizon
Core, plus
GrowthProtection
The modules
Compliance
The filings and documentation that decide an audit before it starts.
- Payroll processing: runs, withholding, quarterly returns, W-2s
- Certified payroll: WH-347 and state equivalents, union and fringe remittance reporting
- Subcontractor compliance: W-9, insurance certificate expiration, license status, lien waiver status
- Sales and use tax: registration and returns across jurisdictions
- Tax preparation: Form 1120S, owner Form 1040, Form 8697 look-back where applicable
Growth
The forward view: what the job is doing while you can still change it.
- WIP reporting: cost-to-cost percent complete monthly, over and under billings identified and explained, and a roll-forward showing what moved and why
- Retainage administration: aged by contract, receivable and payable, reported separately from current AR, with schedule of values maintenance and change order logging
- CFO advisory: rolling cash forecast against WIP and draw schedules, bid capacity modeling, overhead recovery rate and bid multiplier derivation, scenario planning
Protection
What holds up when somebody else is reading your numbers.
- Bonding and surety support: a quarterly package in the format the underwriter reads
- Workers comp audit support: class code review, labor and material separation, overtime premium separation, and the audit package assembled before the auditor asks
- Covenant tracking: measured on the lender dates, managed rather than discovered
What arrives, and how often
Scroll sideways to compare
| Deliverable | Compliance | WIP & Bonding | CFO |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contractor Position Page Core | Monthly | Monthly | Monthly |
| Books reconciled and closed Core | Monthly | Monthly | Monthly |
| Job cost coding Core | Ongoing | Ongoing | Ongoing |
| Review call Core | Quarterly | Quarterly | Quarterly |
| Subcontractor documentation review | Monthly | – | – |
| Audit package assembled | Before policy expiry | – | – |
| Work-in-progress schedule | – | Monthly | – |
| Contract margin against estimate | – | Monthly | – |
| Bonding capacity and position review | – | Quarterly | – |
| Cash forecast | – | – | Rolling, updated weekly |
| Budget against forecast | – | – | Monthly |
| Tax and scenario review | – | – | Quarterly |
Core rows run in every engagement. Below them, a blank means that deliverable is not in that door's set, not that you cannot have it. Modules attach to any engagement, which is the point of running it this way. What you actually need gets settled in the assessment rather than by picking a column.
How we scope it
By what the work actually takes, not by your revenue. Two contractors doing the same volume can need very different things, and we quote it after we have seen your books. There is no rate card, because there is no version of this work that is the same for two contractors.
- Transactions posted, bills entered, and invoices issued
- Payroll headcount, and how often you run it
- Active jobs being cost-coded, and open contracts in the WIP
- Pay applications issued
- Prevailing wage employee-weeks, and your 1099 count
- How many entities and payroll states you run
Reviewed quarterly against a rolling six-month average, and it moves in both directions. If your volume falls, so does the fee.
How this starts
Three steps, and the middle one is not optional. Nobody signs anything before both sides have seen the same picture.
- 01
The initial call
Half an hour on what your contracts look like, what your surety or your lender is asking for, and what is actually constraining the business. No charge, and no obligation on either side.
- 02
The Financial Risk Assessment Required
We work through 120 checkpoints across tax, cash flow, and job margin, then show you what we found and what it is costing. It is how both of us decide: you see whether the work is worth what it costs, and we see whether we can actually move your position. You keep the findings and the plan whether or not you go further.
$497 One flat fee. Required before we take you on, and before you take us on.
What the assessment coversWhat we need from you
- Read-only access to QuickBooks Online or Xero
- Your prior year tax returns
You add us from your side, under Manage Users and Accountants. QuickBooks Online does not allow us to send the invitation, which is the step that most often stalls a start.
- 03
Both of us decide
You have seen what we found and what it is costing before you have committed to anything ongoing. We have seen your books and know whether we can move your position. If we cannot, we say so at this step rather than three months in.
If none of these is you yet
Some contractors are not carrying enough contract complexity for any of this to earn its keep. Bookkeeping on its own is the one engagement attached to nothing: the books still exist if you fire us, and plenty of firms will keep them. We will tell you that rather than sell you the smallest package.
The three above are each attached to something you cannot afford to lose: a scheduled audit, the capacity to bid, and the decisions that change the business. If none of those is live for you yet, come back when one is.
Six questions you can answer from memory, without opening your books. At the end you will know whether the thing constraining you is a surety or the general contractor above you, and which page to read next.
No email. Nothing collected. About a minute.
Start the six questionsWhere this goes
Then a GC asks you to bond a job you want
That is usually how it arrives. Not as an ambition, as a question about work you had already decided you wanted, with a deadline attached. A surety will ask for three years of financials and a current work-in-progress schedule, which is most of what a prequal packet asks for, so a contractor whose reporting already answers one is most of the way to answering the other.
After that the constraint changes hands. You stop bidding against your own paperwork and start bidding against a limit, and the work becomes the schedule an underwriter reads, bonding capacity, and a cash forecast built on your draw and retainage schedules. It is the same engagement carried further. Nothing gets rebuilt when you get there, which is the argument for building it properly the first time.
See the bonded engagementQuestions
What subcontractors ask before they move
What is a schedule of values, and why does my pay application keep coming back?
The schedule of values breaks the contract sum into line items, and the G703 continuation sheet reports progress against each one. A pay application is rejected when the numbers on it cannot be tied back to that schedule, when stored materials are claimed incorrectly, or when the retainage calculation does not match the contract. Almost all of it is a bookkeeping structure problem rather than a dispute about the work, which is why it is fixable.
What is a WIP schedule and why does a general contractor want one?
A work-in-progress schedule lists every open contract with its contract value, costs incurred, estimated cost to complete, and amounts billed, and from that derives whether each job is over- or under-billed. A general contractor prequalifying you reads it to judge whether you can carry the work without running out of cash mid-job. If you have never produced one, it is normally the missing document in a prequal packet.
I am not bonded. Is this still for me?
Yes. Plenty of contractors at this stage are not bonded, or were bonded once and did not enjoy it. Retainage, progress billing against a schedule of values, change orders and prequalification all arrive before a bond does, and they are the things costing you money now. If a bond request does come, the reporting that answers a prequal packet is most of what a surety asks for anyway.
My spouse does the books. Does she lose the job?
That is a decision rather than a requirement, and it is worth having deliberately. In most cases the books were built to produce a tax return, which is a different job from producing a pay application and a WIP schedule. We often take the contract reporting and leave day-to-day entry where it is. What we do not do is quietly expand until nobody knows who owns what.
How is this different from what my accountant does?
Your accountant files the return and reports what already happened. This is contract reporting: a pay application that ties to the schedule of values, retainage tracked by contract, change orders logged before they are approved, and a work-in-progress schedule that exists when someone asks for it. Most contractors at this stage need both, and we will say so rather than push you to consolidate.
How big do I need to be?
Size is not the qualifier. What matters is whether your work arrives as contracts carrying retainage and progress billing, and whether anything is attached to the reporting: a prequal you need to pass, subs you pay, enough concurrent jobs that costing changes a decision, or a bond request on the horizon. If none of that is live yet, standalone bookkeeping is attached to nothing and we will tell you that rather than sell you the smallest thing we have.
Bring the last pay application that came back
That and your current contracts are enough for a first conversation. We will tell you what the retainage across them actually adds up to, what is stalling the billing, and whether this is worth paying anyone to fix yet. If it is not, we will say so.
Talk it through