WHERE A CIVIL JOB LEAKS MONEY.
Three things take money out of a civil job before anybody notices. You pay for mobilization 60 to 90 days ahead of pay app 1. On a $2M dirt job that's $150K to $200K out the door before a dollar comes back. Retainage of 5 to 10 percent is held on every pay app, so three or four concurrent jobs tie up six figures while you pay payroll weekly. Owned iron costs roughly $200 a day parked, and industry idle rates are near 30 percent. If your bid has no ownership rate in it, the bid gave that money away. You can measure all three, and none of them looks like a failure on any single job.
This feels like bad luck because all three are timing problems. You priced the work fine and the crews produced. The money still isn't there on the Friday you need it. If you cut bids to solve it, you make it worse. A lower price does nothing about a 90 day approval cycle or a retainage balance nobody calendared. The fix is to measure these costs and change how you bill. Both are cheap next to the interest a line of credit charges to cover the same hole.
Rather talk it through first? Book a 20 minute call. Nothing gets sold on this call.
Want Josh to check your own numbers? Financial Health Snapshot, $1,500 one time. Your last 12 months read against your trade's benchmarks, with a 60 minute readout.
WHAT IT MEANS.
Civil contractor financial problems are cash timing problems first. You pay for mobilization, retainage, and equipment ownership long before the pay application that covers them clears.
Public and DOT work makes all three worse at once. You get paid when the approval cycle finishes, whatever the invoice date. Average construction days sales outstanding is between 51 and 83 days, with public work at the long end. Owners often cap billable mobilization at 5 to 10 percent of contract and release it in stages. California PCC 10264 releases 50 percent of bid mobilization at 5 percent earned, 75 percent at 10 percent earned, and 95 percent at 20 percent earned. That's a good job you have to finance.
The average general contractor waits 83 days to be paid, and a civil subcontractor one tier below waits longer than that. Pay-when-paid pushes the owner's payment risk down to whoever performed the work. You finance the job, then wait on somebody else's collections. You can't negotiate that on most public work, so you have to price it and fund it.
THE THREE LEAKS THAT DO THE DAMAGE.
You fund the start of every job yourself
You pay for crews, fuel, bond premiums, permits, temporary facilities, and equipment moves before the first pay application clears. The wait is 60 to 90 days on most commercial and public work. On a $2M dirt job that's $150K to $200K out the door before a dollar comes back. Put mobilization inside unit prices and you fund startup out of pocket, then recover it slowly across the whole job.
Retainage stacks across every open job
Five to ten percent is held on every pay app until substantial completion or later, and each job is held separately. With three or four jobs at once, six figures are held while you pay payroll every week. A $1M retainage balance financed on a line at 8 percent APR costs about $40K over a six month schedule. That interest buys you nothing.
Owned iron bills nothing when it is idle
Ownership cost continues whether a machine works or is parked. A CAT 330 excavator costs roughly $200 a day in ownership cost while idle, and industry idle rates average around 30 percent. A bid built without an ownership rate gives that money to the project owner, and no report will ever show it as a loss, because the cost never posted to the job in the first place.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN DOLLARS.
A $1M retainage balance financed on a line of credit at 8 percent APR costs about $40K over a six month schedule. That's pure waste. It's what you pay to hold a receivable the contract already earned, and it's the cleanest example there is of a cost that never appears anywhere in an estimate.
A $7.1M civil contractor found $779K in total to date once equipment and mobilization costs were tracked and billed. Nothing changed about the crews, the iron, or the work. The money was already inside the business. The only thing missing was the reporting.
WHAT CHANGES FIRST.
Mobilization gets its own line and gets billed on pay app 1, before production billing starts. Demobilization goes on a separate line at closeout. On public work where the owner caps and stages the release, the staging goes into the cash forecast up front, so you don't find out in month two. That one change moves the largest single number on this page.
Retainage comes out of the accounts receivable balance and becomes its own class. Each job's release date goes on a calendar, and working capital is sized to cover the total. You can't collect a release you haven't put on the calendar, and you can't size a credit line against a number nobody totals.
Every machine gets an hourly or daily rate covering depreciation, interest, insurance, and storage, and that rate posts to the job that used it. Billed hours then get compared against the rate monthly. If the rate only covers fuel and maintenance, every idle day comes straight out of net profit and the estimate never knew.
Sureties size a bonding program off working capital and a clean work in progress schedule. A civil sub with held retainage, absorbed equipment cost, and no WIP report reaches its bonding limit right when the larger public work becomes available. The CONTROL standard is working capital at 10 to 15 percent of annual revenue, with 13 percent as the number to build toward. It also calls for a current ratio between 1.3 and 2.0 and debt to equity below 1.0.
THE OUTPUTS, NAMED.
FLAT MONTHLY FEE. NO SURPRISES.
Three tiers, priced by your trailing twelve month revenue. Which one you're in depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. We don't bill by the hour, and we don't do payroll. The one-time onboarding fee is in the table.
Built for subs doing $1M to $12M. Above $12.5M we quote.
| Last 12 months revenue | Core | Strategic | Platinum | One-time onboarding |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under $1M | $1,900 | $3,100 | $3,300 | $2,500 |
| $1M to $3.5M | $2,600 | $4,100 | $5,300 | $4,500 |
| $3.5M to $6.5M | $3,800 | $5,900 | $8,300 | $6,000 |
| $6.5M to $9.5M | $5,100 | $7,600 | $11,800 | $7,500 |
| $9.5M to $12.5M | $6,100 | $8,900 | $14,900 | $9,000 |
| Above $12.5M | Quoted | Quoted | Quoted | Quoted |
The onboarding fee covers migrating your books back to the start of your last taxable year and getting you fully operational in 60 days. It's billed once, with your first invoice. It's the same for all three tiers, and it moves with your revenue band. Your first month is prorated, and your monthly engagement starts on the first of the first full month.
Just want the setup? Onboarding only is the same onboarding work with no monthly service after it, one time, at the onboarding fee plus $2,000. Start a monthly engagement later and $2,000 counts toward it. It starts at $4,500, and the price for every band is on the pricing page.
The three tier columns are the whole price. Which one fits depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. No payroll. No hidden line items. The onboarding fee is right here in the table.
- Online software only: QuickBooks, Sage, Viewpoint and similar. No VPN or hosted desktop.
- Not in any tier: payroll, pay applications, collections on receivables.
- Pricing valid through 2027.
CFO work. Your own bookkeeper keeps doing the books.
We build your plan every month. Your team does the work.
You get the CFO work: job costing built to match the way you estimate, a 13 week cash forecast, WIP every month, and a monthly meeting that ends with decisions.
Your bookkeeper still does the books.
Core, plus bookkeeping and bank reconciliations, plus job costing and WIP software set up and managed for you. Use your own online accounting software or we supply it, one price.
We build the plan, track it and adjust it every month.
We only work with trade subcontractors. We know what to look for, and we fix problems while they're still small. Everything in Core, plus the bookkeeping and bank reconciliations done for you, and the job costing and WIP software set up, loaded with your cost codes, and managed every month. Use your own online software, or move to ours and we pay for it.
Our team does the bookkeeping and the reconciliations. We don't do payroll.
Strategic, plus a controller who handles payables and receivables the way an in-house controller would. You approve every payment.
We manage the money side for you, every week.
Everything in Strategic, plus our team does the controller work. We handle your bills and receivables the way an in-house controller would: we call vendors, pay the bills and keep the accounting current. We plan the cash flow first, and you approve every payment because it is your money.
Our team does the payables and receivables. We don't do payroll, pay applications or collections.
FREQUENTLY ASKED.
