YOU ALMOST MISSED PAYROLL.
Subcontractors near-miss payroll for one reason: cash isn't converting out of backlog fast enough to cover weekly obligations. Billing is slow, AR is aging, and there's no 13 week forecast showing the shortfall 6 weeks before it hits. The work is sold and the money is earned. The financial system is just not moving it fast enough.
Treat the near-miss as the financial system sending a distress call, not as one bad month or one slow GC. What broke is billing velocity, AR management, and cash forecasting, and none of those three repair themselves. Every owner who comes within a day of missing payroll once will do it again unless the process behind them changes. The encouraging part is that the money is almost always earned and owed already. It's sitting in somebody else's accounts payable queue because nobody made a phone call on Monday.
WHAT IT MEANS.
A payroll near-miss is what happens when a subcontractor has already earned the money but can't get it into the bank before Friday, so wages come due against a balance that won't cover them.
Backlog doesn't pay Friday. Cash does. A subcontractor can be sold out for eight months, carrying a healthy margin in every job, and still come up short on a Wednesday, because the money is earned in the field and collected in an office 45 days later. The distance between those two events is the whole problem, and it's a process problem rather than a sales problem.
There's no early warning in most subcontractor accounting, no collection process driving AR in, and no cash model that puts the crunch in front of the owner 6 weeks out. So the owner finds out on Wednesday and has three options: draw on the line of credit, call the GC and beg, or delay payroll and hope nobody quits. All three are symptoms of the same failure.
WHY THE MONEY WAS NOT THERE.
Billing lag is bleeding cash
Most subcontractors submit pay applications on a monthly cycle, whenever work is completed or whenever somebody gets to it. A contractor who bills on the 25th of the month for work completed through the 20th is already 5 days behind. If the GC has a 20th cut off for the following month's payment cycle, that pay app misses a full cycle and the cash comes in 45 to 60 days after the work was done.
AR is aging and nobody is following up
Submitted pay apps that go unpaid don't collect themselves. Most subcontractors follow up once, maybe twice, and then wait. The GC knows this. A GC managing 40 active subcontracts will pay the subs who push, and the ones who wait get paid last.
There's no forecast, so the surprise is structural
A payroll near-miss is never really a surprise. The conditions that produced it, slow billing, aging AR, and a big payable coming due, were visible in the numbers weeks before the crisis hit. The problem is that no model was putting them in front of the owner while there was still time to fix them.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN DOLLARS.
A $4.2M civil contractor has $1.1M in active backlog and $287K in receivables. Payroll is $68K every two weeks. On the Wednesday before a payroll run, the owner checks the bank balance and it reads $54K against $68K due Friday. The $287K is real money, but two pay apps submitted 38 days ago haven't been paid, and the payroll date doesn't move because the GC is slow.
Average AR age for a subcontractor with no weekly follow up system is 38 days. With active collections it runs 18 to 24 days. Contractors who put the weekly process in place see aging drop from 38 days to under 22 within 60 days. On a $3M company, that recovery is typically $80K to $120K of cash moving from outstanding to collected.
A $3M to $5M sub without billing discipline carries roughly $180K in unbilled or uncollected AR on active jobs at any given moment. That's your money funding somebody else's project. Six weeks is the minimum horizon the 13 week forecast has to project to allow corrective action before a cash crisis reaches payroll.
WHAT GETS INSTALLED.
Every active job gets a billing deadline mapped to that GC's cut off date. Pay apps go out 2 days before the cut off, not after. One missed billing cycle on a $500K job represents $40K to $60K of delayed cash. On a $400K job, that single change speeds up cash receipt by 15 to 20 days, which is often the difference between making payroll and not.
Every Monday, every invoice over 25 days gets active follow up. Not next week, not when there's time, Monday. The follow up is tracked in ControlQore: who was contacted, what was said, and when payment is expected. GCs who know somebody is watching pay faster, aging drops, and cash moves.
Built in week one of every engagement, updated every Monday, and reviewed every Monday morning with the owner. Cash inflows from scheduled billing and expected collections, cash outflows from payroll, payables, and debt service, and the net bank position week by week for 13 weeks. A forecasted low point 7 weeks out is a collection call today. Without the forecast it's a panic call Thursday morning.
If you're in a payroll crisis today, stop. Before drawing on the line of credit or calling an MCA broker, call your top 3 GC accounts and request immediate payment on the oldest outstanding invoice. SPM has recovered over $2.1M in client AR since 2023. Most acute cash crises resolve within 5 to 10 business days through aggressive collections rather than through debt.
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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