For General Contractors
Introduce a subcontractor who needs stronger books and contract reporting. We work with the sub directly, with a clear boundary around their financial information.
Partner handoffIllustrative structure. Your scope is agreed together.
The boundary comes first
An introduction gives you no access to the sub’s financial information.
We do not keep the books of general contractors. Not yours, and not the GC your sub works for on his other jobs. That is a deliberate limit on who we take as a client rather than a rule about who inside the firm may look at what, and it exists so that the question your sub is going to ask has a one-sentence answer.
That answer is simply that his customer is not our client. There is no internal division of duties for him to trust, no wall he has to believe we maintain, and nothing anyone here has to choose not to look at. If you would rather have the mechanics as well: access in QuickBooks Online and Xero is granted per company file, and we are only ever in the file of the business that hired us.
It runs the other way too, and this is the part worth being blunt about. Introducing a sub to us does not give you a window into him. We do not report his financials, his margins, his job costs or his bid detail to you, we do not monitor him on your behalf, and we will not answer questions about him. What you get back is a sub whose paperwork keeps up with your job. What you do not get is his numbers.
Where the relationship exists we tell both parties it exists, and the same commitment is written into the engagement agreement. If you would rather we did not take a particular sub at all, say so and we will not.
What it costs you
None of this is about whether he can build. It is about whether the paperwork behind him can keep up with the job, and every one of these lands on your side of the line rather than his.
A sub who cannot produce financials or a work-in-progress schedule cannot clear prequalification, whatever his crews can do. You end up choosing from who can pass the packet rather than who is best for the scope.
Your schedule, the premium you pay to bring someone in mid-scope, and the delay you carry downstream. His insolvency is his problem for about a week and yours for the rest of the job.
Pay applications that arrive wrong or late stall your own draw, because your billing is assembled from theirs. One sub who cannot tie a G702 to the schedule of values can hold up a whole month.
An expired insurance certificate or a missing lien waiver on the sub side does not stay on the sub side. It becomes your exposure on the project, and unreleased waivers can cloud title.
A sub who cannot tell what a job is costing him finds out when it closes. A sub who finds out mid-project brings you a change order argument you either absorb or litigate.
A surety writes against financial statements. If his cannot support the bond your project requires, the constraint is his bookkeeping rather than his capability, and it is your job that goes unbid.
What happens to the sub
The same work we run for any commercial contractor, aimed at the things that were failing your prequal packet.
Most inherited contractor books were built to produce a tax return. The chart of accounts gets rebuilt for job-level reporting, and the month actually closes on a calendar.
Pay applications built from the same numbers the books hold, in the format you expect, so they stop coming back to him and stop holding up your draw.
Aged by contract rather than buried in receivables. Work performed against an unapproved change order exists as a tracked position from the day it happens rather than as a memory.
WH-347 and the state equivalents, with prevailing wage tracked by trade and locality. It arrives the first time he takes a public job, usually with no warning.
The document your prequal asks for, and the one a surety reads if the job needs him bonded. Produced monthly rather than reconstructed when somebody asks.
The detail sits on the commercial pages rather than here: /commercial/subcontractors is written to him, and /commercial/compliance covers the documentation side.
Making an introduction
Four steps, and you're only responsible for the first one.
An email is enough. You don't need to explain what we do, or vouch for the outcome.
Half an hour on what his contracts look like and what's actually failing. No charge, no obligation either side.
Required before either side agrees to anything. He keeps the findings either way, nobody's invoiced, and you never see them.
If he isn't a fit, he's told so rather than sold the smallest thing we have. That's what protects the credibility you just lent us.
Something to send him
You already prequalify subs and you already know which ones come back short. Forwarding these costs you nothing and commits him to nothing, and it is a more useful reply than telling him his paperwork was not good enough.
Twenty-two items in four groups, with the nine financial ones marked and every line labelled by who produces it. Two pages. He can work it with whoever keeps his books.
Open the resource ↓What those nine items look like when they are produced every month instead of reconstructed on request. Five pages, built for a fictional contractor so the schedules can be read in full.
Open the resource ↓Both are free and neither one asks him for anything. There is no form in front of them on purpose: a document you forward should not arrive asking your contractor for his email address.
Make the introduction
An introduction starts a conversation. The free Financial Risk Assessment is required before either side commits, and the contractor keeps the findings and the plan.
Nothing. There is no referral fee in either direction, and we do not invoice you for anything relating to a sub you introduce. We do not keep books for general contractors at all, which is the other half of the answer: there is no engagement of yours for this to affect.
He gets told, and so do you. Some contractors are not carrying enough contract complexity for this to earn its keep, and standalone bookkeeping is attached to nothing, so we say that rather than sell him the smallest thing we have. Turning people away is what makes your introduction safe to make.
Usually, yes. Most keep their CPA for the return and add this for the contract reporting, which is a different job. Where it makes more sense to consolidate we can, but it is not a requirement and we do not push it if the existing relationship is working.
That is one of the more common reasons a GC sends someone. A surety asks for financial statements and a current work-in-progress schedule, which is most of what your prequal packet asks for, so the two problems have largely the same answer. A first submission runs on a longer clock than a correction, because there is usually no schedule to fix, only one to build.