YOUR GC FILED. NOW WHAT HAPPENS.
The day a general contractor files, your unpaid invoices stop being a collections problem and become a claim. Collections and claims are handled by different people. You have four things to do in the first week. Stop adding cost nobody has directed in writing. Document every quantity you've completed while the crew and the site are still available. Total what you're owed, including retention and unbilled work in place. Find out who else is in the payment chain behind the general contractor. An owner, a construction lender and a payment bond surety may each be there. Then call your construction attorney. Lien rights, bond claims and anything filed with the court are legal work with their own timing. Call your bank and your surety with the number before they read about the filing somewhere else.
Your exposure is almost always bigger than your receivables aging says. The aging report has the invoices you sent. It doesn't have the retention held across the whole job, the work in place you hadn't billed yet, the material already ordered against the schedule, or the crew you now have to redeploy. All of that is money committed to a customer who no longer decides its own payments. If you total only the invoices, you'll give the bank a number and then revise it upward twice.
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WHAT IT MEANS.
A general contractor bankruptcy is a court process that takes control of what the general contractor can pay. Your unpaid receivable stops being a collections problem. It becomes a claim against a business that no longer decides on its own who gets paid.
Some of this is finance and operations work, and some of it is legal work. Documenting quantities, totalling exposure, rebuilding the cash forecast, redeploying crews and calling the bank are finance and operations work. This page covers those. Whether to stop work, whether to file anything, where you are in the payment chain and what any deadline is are legal questions. The answers depend on your state. They belong to a construction attorney who has read your subcontract. A wrong legal answer can't be corrected later, so don't take one from a web page.
Move fast on the operations work, because the evidence gets weaker every week. Your superintendent can walk the site today and photograph installed quantities. That's a record. Three weeks later another trade has covered the work and the crew has moved on. Then all you have is what your superintendent remembers.
WHERE SUBS LOSE MORE THAN THEY HAD TO.
The crew keeps working because nobody in the office said anything
The office hears about a filing long before the field does. Until then your crews keep finishing the work in front of them. Every one of those hours adds cost to an account that has stopped paying. The financial question is who is funding next week. You need the answer before next week starts.
The completed work was never documented, so the claim becomes an argument
Unbilled work in place is usually the largest piece of your exposure and the hardest to prove later. Quantities that were obvious on site in April are one person's opinion by July. By then the finishes are on and your crew is on another job. The contractors who lose the most in these events are the ones who couldn't prove what they had built, even when others were owed more.
Nobody sized the exposure, so the bank found out before the owner did
A filing gets into the trade press and your bank reads it. If your banker has to call you first, you're on the defensive, and the bank discounts every number you give after that. Total the exposure, rebuild the forecast with it, and make the call yourself. Do all three in the same week the filing becomes public.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN DOLLARS.
Say you have one pay application outstanding at $180,000. Retention held across the job to date is $62,000. Work in place you've completed and not yet billed is $45,000. Material ordered against the schedule and not yet delivered is $30,000. Your receivables aging shows $180,000. Your exposure is $317,000. That's the number your forecast and your bank conversation both need. If you size this from the aging report alone, you understate it by most of the amount.
Put the same $317,000 against two businesses. The first has $6M of trailing revenue, and that customer was 12 percent of the book. The exposure is a hard year. The second has $2M of trailing revenue, and that same general contractor was 40 percent of the book. The exposure is most of a year's overhead, and the crews on that work have nothing to move to. The event and the dollars are the same. The only difference is concentration, and you could have measured it long before the filing.
THE FIRST WEEK, IN ORDER.
We total what one more week of work on that job costs you in labor, material and equipment. Then we total how much of it anybody has directed in writing and is funding. That gives you a number. Whether you can stop, whether you have to keep going, and what your subcontract and any court direction require are legal questions. Your construction attorney answers them with the math in front of them.
Quantities in place, dated photographs, signed field tickets, delivery records and the last approved pay application all go into one file in the first days. Anything your superintendent can verify today gets verified today. This file decides what happens later, because a claim of any kind starts with documentation.
Outstanding pay applications, retention to date, work in place not yet billed, committed material and any bond or insurance cost for that job go into one total. Then the 13 week cash forecast gets rebuilt. That money comes out of the inflow, and the cost to redeploy the crew goes into the outflow. Now you know whether this is a bad quarter or a solvency question. It should take a day.
The general contractor may not be the only party with money attached to your work. The project owner, a construction lender and a payment bond surety can each be part of the payment chain. A joint check arrangement with a supplier is sometimes available while the rest gets worked out. Your contract documents say which of those you have on your project. So the subcontract, the bond and the notice history all go to your attorney together.
Both of them are going to learn about the filing. Call with a sized exposure, a rebuilt forecast and a redeployment plan, and they see a contractor who is managing the event. Wait, and they start managing you. Bad news you deliver early tells them you're in control. The same news delivered late makes you a file somebody needs to watch.
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.
