It's Thursday night, payroll goes out tomorrow, and your contracting company just had a profitable month, but there's barely enough cash to cover it. You've checked the profit and loss report twice, and it still looks nothing like the checking account.
When a profitable contractor runs short like this, the money for work already done is usually stuck somewhere between the job and the bank, in invoices that went out late, customers who pay slowly, materials bought weeks before the job pays, and deposits and progress payments that don't keep up with what the job costs. Profit shows up on your books when you invoice, but cash only shows up when the customer pays, and the time between those two days is where most cash crunches start. So the fix is to shorten that time, starting with how fast you invoice, and to run a fifteen-minute cash check once a week, by hand or in QuickBooks Online, so nothing sneaks up on you.
The Federal Reserve Banks' Small Business Credit Survey found that 51% of employer firms dealt with uneven cash flow, which includes collecting on receivables, and 56% had trouble paying operating expenses like payroll and rent. In a busy company, that usually means the way cash moves through the business hasn't kept up with the work, and you can fix that one piece at a time.
Why am I out of cash when my company is making a profit?
You run out of cash while making a profit because you pay for a job before the job pays you. Your crew gets paid every week or two, the supply house wants its money on its terms, and the customer pays whenever they get around to it, so the busier you get, the more cash you have tied up in work that hasn't been paid for yet.
Growth makes this worse before it makes it better. Taking on a bigger job or a few more crews means buying more materials and carrying more payroll up front, and if the payments lag the way they always have, the distance between what you've spent and what you've collected keeps growing. That's why plenty of owners feel the squeeze hardest in their best year, and why the first step is finding out where your own cash is sitting.
Where is my cash getting stuck?
Cash in a trades company usually gets stuck in five places, and most shops have money sitting in at least two or three of them at once. The first two are invoices that go out late and customers who pay slowly. If the invoice waits until Friday or the end of the month, every day it waits is a day added to when you'll get paid. QuickBooks' 2026 late payments report found that 59% of small businesses have invoices overdue by 30 days or more, up from 47% the year before, and that businesses with unpaid invoices are owed $17,700 on average.
The next two live inside the job. Equipment and materials paid for weeks before the job starts, along with stock on shelves and in the trucks, are cash you can't use for anything else. And on a long job, if your deposit and progress billing schedule lags behind what you're spending, you're financing the customer's project. The fifth shows up at the end of the job, in retainage held back until a commercial job closes out and in extra work done on a handshake that never makes it onto an invoice, and both quietly drain cash you've already earned.
In that same QuickBooks report, 39% of owners said a single late payment made it hard to cover payroll or bills in the past year. On Mike Holt's electrical forum, a thread about slow payers opened with "I'm sure some of you have customers who drag payments out to 60 or 90 days," and a residential electrician replied, "You need a written contract with these individuals with late fees." That reply points straight at the first fix, which starts with your invoices and your contract.
How fast should I be sending invoices?
Invoice the day the job is done, or the day a progress milestone is reached, and collect on site whenever you can, because every day an invoice waits is a day of payroll you're covering out of your own pocket. On installs and bigger jobs, the payment schedule belongs in the contract up front, so the customer knows when each payment is due and what triggers it. The Oregon Construction Contractors Board's guide to home improvement contracts says a contract should state "whether there is a down payment at the beginning," list installment "pay dates and amounts required," and describe "the consequences if the homeowner fails to make a payment."
You can tighten up your billing this month with five steps:
Pick one person who owns invoicing, and make "invoice the same day" their written standard.
Take payment on site for service calls, by card or check, before the tech leaves.
Put a clear payment schedule and late fee terms in every contract for larger jobs.
Write up change orders and get them signed before the extra work starts, then bill them with the next payment.
Call, rather than email, on anything 15 days past due, and keep calling on a set schedule.
If chasing payments has turned into a part-time job, my accounts receivable work for contractors is built around exactly these steps. Either way, faster billing only helps if you can see it working, which is what the weekly check is for.
What should I look at every week so cash doesn't surprise me?
A weekly cash check is fifteen minutes on the same day each week, and it comes down to four numbers you don't need an accountant to pull:
Write down the cash in the bank today, across your operating accounts.
Add up what's owed to you, split into current, 1 to 30 days late, 31 to 60, and over 60.
List what you owe in the next two weeks, including payroll, supply house bills, rent, loan payments and taxes.
Add up what you expect to collect in the next two weeks, from invoices due and payments scheduled on jobs.
If cash on hand plus what you expect to collect doesn't comfortably cover what you owe, you know it two weeks ahead instead of the morning payroll is due, and you've still got time to make calls, push billing on a milestone or hold off on a big order.
You can do this by hand on a sheet of paper or a simple spreadsheet, with those four lines down the side and a column for each week. After a month or two you'll see your own pattern, like which weeks are always tight and which customers are always late, and that's when it helps to let QuickBooks do the adding.
How do I set up a weekly cash check in QuickBooks Online?
QuickBooks Online has two reports that cover most of the check, starting with the A/R aging report, which QuickBooks' help page on running an accounts receivable aging report says is under Reports, then Standard reports, in the "Who owes you" section. The summary version shows "the total outstanding balances and how long they're past due," and the detail version shows which customers owe and on which invoices.
The second is the cash flow planner, which QuickBooks' cash flow planner help page says "uses your QuickBooks data to help you plan your future cash flow," drawing on your invoices, bills and connected bank accounts. You'll find it under Reports, then Financial planning, and you can add planned items to test a what-if, which QuickBooks says "don't affect your books." The help page lists it for Simple Start, Essentials, Plus and Advanced, but not with multicurrency turned on.
The planner only knows what's in QuickBooks, so it works best when invoices go in the day the work is done and your field service software syncs cleanly. If that sync is part of the problem, here's how I approach QuickBooks integration for contractors.
Questions owners ask
How much cash should a contractor keep in reserve?
There's no single right number, but a common way to set a target is to count how many weeks of payroll and fixed bills you could cover if no customer paid you, and build toward that one week at a time. Your bookkeeper or CPA can help you pick a number that fits your seasons.
Should I use a line of credit to cover payroll?
A line of credit can be a sensible cushion for the weeks between paying out and getting paid, as long as it's paid back as soon as the customer pays. If you're using it every month just to make payroll, that's usually a sign the problem is in pricing, billing speed or collections, which is worth fixing first and talking through with your banker and your CPA.
How do I get customers to pay faster?
Invoice the same day, collect on site for service work and make paying easy with card and online options. Then put due dates and late fee terms in writing before the job starts, and follow up by phone on a set schedule rather than waiting and hoping.
What's a reasonable deposit to ask for in Oregon?
The Oregon CCB's guide to home improvement contracts doesn't set a deposit amount. It says the contract should spell out whether there's a down payment, the schedule of installment payments and what happens if a payment is missed, and it notes that by law you need a written contract when a project is over $2,000. Check with the CCB or your attorney before you change your contract.
Now picture that same Thursday night a couple of months from now. You've been running the cash check every Monday, so you saw this week coming two weeks ago and already called the customers who were past due. Payroll still goes out in the morning, but tonight the number in the checking account is one you planned for.
If you'd like to see where cash is getting stuck in your own company, the free Foundation Inspection follows a job from the first call to the money in the bank and asks who owns each step, including invoicing, chasing late payments and checking cash every week. It takes about an hour and shows you which few handoffs would make the biggest difference first.
I'm Tim Volner, and I run Sentric Group in Salem, Oregon, where I work with contractors who've built a solid company but have reached the point where it can't seem to run for a single day without them.