You bid bigger jobs than you used to. Your financial systems did not get the memo.

Most trades businesses we meet are doing the hard part right. The crews show up. The work gets done. The customers come back. What is breaking is not the work. It is the math behind the work.

WIP that the bookkeeper put together once and nobody has touched in a year. Job costs that include direct labor and materials but not the overhead that actually eats the profit. Cash that is technically there but locked up in retainage. A bonding line that is capping how much work you can take on, and nobody is sure why it is not bigger.

None of this is unusual. All of it is fixable. None of it gets fixed by working harder.

The three constraints

Bonding Capacity

Your surety needs more from your financials than your bank does. They are not just looking at whether you can pay back a loan. They are betting on whether you can finish the job. That bet runs on financial statements that are clean, current, and presented in the format the surety expects.

We build the financials your surety asks for, in the format they want, on the cadence they need. Bonding lines that should be bigger usually are not because the financials do not give the surety what they need to say yes.

Work in Process Accuracy

WIP done right is one of the most powerful management tools in construction finance. WIP done wrong is one of the most common reasons trades businesses lose money without knowing it. Over-billed jobs that are actually under-earned. Under-billed jobs that look like profit but are really cash leaks waiting to happen.

We build WIP reports that close monthly, agree to the GL, and tell you what is actually happening on each job. Not what looked true the last time someone updated the spreadsheet.

Cash Timing

A profitable trades business can run out of cash anyway. The reasons are familiar: retainage tied up across multiple jobs, progress billings that should have gone out a week ago, payroll obligations that hit before the next draw, materials ordered ahead of revenue. The math is not complicated. The visibility is what is missing.

13-week cash forecasting built around retainage, progress billings, and material timing changes how the business is run, not just how it is reported.

What we build

• WIP reporting that the surety trusts and the GL agrees with.
• Job costing with overhead allocation that tells you which jobs make money and which jobs make noise.
• Bonding-ready financial packages on the surety's preferred cadence.
• 13-week cash forecasting built around retainage, progress billings, and material timing.
• Equipment and fleet ROI tracking. Useful before you buy. Useful after you finance.
• Subcontractor and vendor management discipline that does not depend on remembering to check.

Proof and story

“When Paul stepped in, our EBITDA quadrupled in eighteen months. He did not tell us what we wanted to hear. He told us what we needed to know.”

A specialty contractor came to us with a bonding line that had not moved in three years. Their books were technically accurate but presented in a format their surety could not underwrite from. Same business, same crews, same customers. Different financials. Bonding capacity doubled inside twelve months.