YOUR GC FILED. NOW WHAT HAPPENS.
The day a general contractor files, your unpaid invoices stop being a collections problem and become a claim, and those two things are handled by different people. Four moves belong to you and they belong to 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 up what you're owed including retention and unbilled work in place, and find out who else sits in the payment chain behind the general contractor, because an owner, a construction lender, and a payment bond surety may each be there. Then call your construction attorney, because lien rights, bond claims, and anything filed with the court are legal work with their own timing. Your bank and your surety should hear the number from you before they read about the filing somewhere else.
What makes this event so expensive is that the exposure is almost always bigger than the receivables aging says it is. The aging report holds invoices you sent. It doesn't hold retention accumulated across the whole job, work in place you hadn't billed yet, material already ordered against the schedule, or the crew you now have to redeploy. Every one of those is money committed to a customer who has stopped deciding its own payments, and a contractor who sizes only the invoices walks into the bank with a number that gets revised upward twice.
WHAT IT MEANS.
A general contractor bankruptcy is a court process that takes control of what the general contractor is able to pay, which turns a subcontractor's unpaid receivable from a collections problem into a claim against a business that no longer decides on its own who gets paid.
The division of labor on this is worth being blunt about. Documenting quantities, totalling exposure, rebuilding the cash forecast, redeploying crews, and calling the bank are all finance and operations work, and they're the work this page describes. Whether to stop work, whether to file anything, what your position is in the payment chain, and what any deadline is are legal questions with state specific answers, and they belong to a construction attorney who has read your subcontract. Getting the second set wrong is the kind of mistake that can't be corrected later, which is why nobody should take it from a web page.
Speed on the operational side is worth more here than anywhere else in this business, because the evidence decays. A superintendent who can walk the site today and photograph installed quantities is producing a record. The same person three weeks later, after another trade has covered the work and the crew has moved on, is producing a recollection.
WHERE SUBS LOSE MORE THAN THEY HAD TO.
The crew keeps working because nobody in the office said anything
News of a filing reaches the office long before it reaches the field, and in the meantime the crews do what they always do, which is finish the work in front of them. Every one of those hours adds cost to an account that has stopped paying. The financial question is simple, which is who is funding the next week, and the answer has to come before the next week rather than during it.
The completed work was never documented, so the claim becomes an argument
Unbilled work in place is usually the largest single piece of the exposure and the hardest to prove after the fact. Quantities that were obvious on site in April are one person's opinion by July, once finishes are on and the crew is on another job. Contractors who lose the most in these events are rarely the ones who were owed the most. They're the ones who couldn't evidence what they had built.
Nobody sized the exposure, so the bank found out before the owner did
A filing hits the trade press and the bank reads it. If the first conversation about it's the banker calling you, the position you're in is defensive and every number you give after that's discounted. The exposure needs a total, a forecast reflecting it, and a call you initiate, all inside the same week the filing becomes public.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN DOLLARS.
Take a sub with one pay application outstanding at $180,000, retention held across the job to date of $62,000, work in place completed and not yet billed of $45,000, and material ordered against the schedule and not yet delivered of $30,000. The receivables aging shows $180,000. The exposure is $317,000. That's the number the forecast needs and the number the bank conversation needs, and the difference between the two is why sizing this from the aging report alone understates it by most of the amount.
Take the same $317,000 against two businesses. At $6M of trailing revenue that customer was 12 percent of the book and the exposure is a hard year. At $2M of trailing revenue with that same general contractor as 40 percent of the book, the exposure is most of a year's overhead and the crews that served it have nothing to move to. Same event, same dollars, two entirely different outcomes, and the only variable is concentration that was measurable long before the filing.
THE FIRST WEEK, IN ORDER.
We total what one more week of work costs you in labor, material, and equipment on that job, and what portion of it anybody has directed in writing and is funding. That produces a number, not a decision. 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, and the arithmetic is what makes that call an informed one.
Quantities in place, dated photographs, signed field tickets, delivery records, and the last approved pay application all get pulled into one file in the first days. Anything the superintendent can verify today gets verified today. This is the least glamorous item on the list and the one that decides what happens later, because a claim of any kind is a documentation exercise before it's anything else.
Outstanding pay applications, retention accumulated to date, work in place not yet billed, committed material, and any bond or insurance cost specific to that job get added into one total. Then the 13 week cash forecast gets rebuilt with that money removed from the inflow and the crew redeployment cost added to the outflow. That's how an owner finds out whether this is a bad quarter or a solvency question, and 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 structure, and a joint check arrangement is sometimes available with a supplier while the rest gets worked out. Which of those routes exists on your project is a contract documents question, so the subcontract, the bond, and the notice history go to your attorney together rather than one at a time.
Both of them are going to learn about the filing. A contractor who calls with a sized exposure, a rebuilt forecast, and a redeployment plan is a contractor managing an event. A contractor who waits is a contractor being managed. Bad news delivered early reads as control, and the same news delivered late reads as 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. No hourly billing, no payroll, and no add-ons.
Pricing
| Last 12 months revenue | Monthly fee |
|---|---|
| Up to $1M | $1,900 to $2,900 |
| $1M to $3.5M | $2,600 to $3,900 |
| $3.5M to $6.5M | $3,800 to $5,700 |
| $6.5M to $9.5M | $5,100 to $7,100 |
| $9.5M to $12.5M | $6,100 to $8,500 |
| $12.5M to $15.5M | $7,400 to $11,000 |
| $15.5M to $18.5M | $9,400 to $13,500 |
| $18.5M+ | Quoted individually |
Range reflects the three tiers below. Which one you're in depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. No payroll. No hidden line items.
You stop guessing.
You get the CFO work. Job costing built against the way you estimate, a 13 week cash forecast, monthly WIP, and a meeting every month that ends in decisions rather than a report.
Your bookkeeper keeps doing the books.
You stop touching the books.
Everything in Core, and we run the bookkeeping and the controllership as well. Nobody in your office is answering coding questions or chasing a reconciliation at month end.
We do the books. No payroll.
Every job shows its margin while it's still running.
Everything in Executive, plus the job costing and WIP platform set up, loaded with your cost codes, and managed for you every month. You never have to learn it.
We do the job costing.
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