You fund the job. Then you get paid for it.
Mobilization, materials and a crew all land before the first draw clears — and a slice of the contract sits as retainage until the whole thing is finished. Winning bigger work makes that worse before it makes it better.
The shape of the gap
- Money out
Mobilization, materials at order, crew every week the job runs. Equipment and permits before anyone swings a hammer.
- Money in
Progress draws against completed work, on the owner's or the GC's approval cycle — and commonly 5 to 10 percent held as retainage until the job closes out.
- The distance
So the biggest outflow is at the front, the inflow trails the work by a billing cycle, and the last slice does not arrive until long after the crew has moved on.
This is the structure of the trade, not a failure of yours. It is also why growth is the dangerous part: a bigger job front-loads a bigger hole.
- 1Day 0Mobilization, materials at order, crew from week one.
- 2Day 30First progress draw — less the retainage held back.
- 3Day 60Second draw. Same deduction again.
- 4Day 90Third draw. The held-back slice keeps accumulating.
- 5Day 120Job complete. The crew has moved on; the retainage has not.
- 6Day 160Retainage released at close-out — if the paperwork is clean.
Retainage is the part that surprises people
A slice of every progress payment is commonly withheld until the job is complete and closed out. On paper it is money you have earned. In your account it is money you do not have, sometimes for months after the work finished.
It means a contractor can be fully current on billing, entirely profitable on the job, and still short — because the margin is sitting in retainage on three jobs at once. That is not a cash-flow problem caused by poor management; it is the contract working exactly as written.
Public and private work are different animals
Public work tends to pay reliably and slowly, with a defined process, prevailing wage obligations, and paperwork that has to be right before anything moves. Private work can pay faster and can also stop paying, and the recourse is different.
It changes how predictable your receivables are, which is the thing a bank statement is being read for. It is one of the first questions we ask because the answer reframes everything after it.
The bid you're about to win is the real question
Most contractors who come to us are not short on the work they have. They are looking at something bigger than they can currently float, and deciding whether to bid it.
That is worth raising early rather than after the award. The size of the gap a job creates is knowable in advance — mobilization, material at order, weeks of crew before the first draw — and it is a far better conversation than working out after you have signed that the float was not there.
What tends to help a contractor file
One thing matters more than the rest here, and as with everything on this page it shifts which partners suit the file rather than whether it is worth submitting.
Commercial receivables rather than residential
Who is on the invoices does more work than almost anything else. A GC, a property manager, a municipality — a commercial counterparty has its own books, a payment process and a reason to pay on terms, and all of that is verifiable from the outside. Residential work can be excellent business and still be harder to read from a bank statement. A mix is normal, and worth describing accurately rather than rounding up.
Zelle is fine. Only Zelle is not.
It is common in this trade and there is nothing wrong with taking it. But deposits arriving entirely as person-to-person transfers are harder to read as business revenue than the same money arriving as ACH, cheque or card settlement — a transfer does not carry what an invoice carries. If Zelle is the only way you get paid, widening that is one of the few things on this page you can genuinely change in a few weeks.
None of this is a checklist you have to pass, and if you have read it as one, read it again. Our job as a marketplace is to find a funding partner who will take the file as it actually is — that is the entire reason to go through us rather than apply to one funder and treat their answer as the answer. We ask about these things early so we know which partners to put the file in front of, not so we can tell you no.
What we'll ask you
Three questions, early, because they decide how the file gets packaged. None of them is a test and none of them has a wrong answer.
Whether the work is public or private
It sets how predictable the receivable is and what the recourse looks like. Public and private jobs are read very differently off the same set of statements.
Your draw schedule and the retainage percentage
Together these describe the real gap, and neither is visible on a bank statement. A monthly draw with 10 percent retained is a materially different position from a milestone draw with 5.
Whether you're bidding something bigger than you can currently float
If so, that is the actual conversation, and it has a deadline attached to it. Sizing a gap before you commit to a job is worth more than solving one after.
Which product tends to match this pattern
Not a recommendation about your file — nobody has seen it yet. This is which shape of product matches which shape of gap.
Questions we get from this trade
Can funding be tied to one specific job?
What we place is working capital against the business rather than against a single contract or invoice. If what you need is tied to one job's receivable specifically, that is a different instrument and worth naming on the call so nobody wastes a week discovering it.
My revenue is lumpy — big months, empty months. Does that disqualify me?
It is normal in this trade and it does not disqualify anything by itself. What it does mean is that three months of statements may not represent your year, so context matters more here than in most industries. Say which months those are and why.
I'm a sub, not a GC. Does that change things?
It changes who pays you and how far down the chain the money travels before it reaches you, which is worth being explicit about. Pay-when-paid terms in particular are worth mentioning up front, because they lengthen the real cycle well beyond what the invoice date suggests.
What we can't tell you
What you would be offered, what it would cost, or how fast it would arrive. Funding partners decide all three and put them in writing before you sign; we are a broker and not a party to that agreement. And on the bid you are weighing: we can help you size the gap honestly, but we cannot tell you the job is worth taking. That is your call and it should stay your call.
One form. Then a real conversation.
About two minutes, and it costs nothing. If you are weighing a bid, bring the draw schedule to the call and we can be useful about the actual number.