If you've applied for a larger bonding line, a line of credit, or gone through a more formal loan underwriting process, you've probably been asked for a "WIP schedule" — and if you're like most specialty contractors, that request was met with some combination of confusion and a scramble to figure out what exactly they want.
A work-in-progress (WIP) schedule is a report that shows the financial status of every active job at a given point in time: contract value, costs incurred to date, billings to date, and — critically — how much of the job's revenue has actually been earned based on percentage of completion, versus how much has been billed. It's the single report that tells a lender or bonding company whether your billing practices are healthy or whether you're quietly using new job deposits to cover old job losses.
The two numbers that matter most
- Overbilling (billings in excess of costs). You've billed more than the percentage-of-completion earned revenue justifies. A little overbilling is normal cash flow management. A lot of it, across many jobs, is a red flag that the business may be using new contracts to fund old ones.
- Underbilling (costs in excess of billings). You've done the work and incurred the cost, but haven't billed for it yet. This ties up cash and, at scale, is often a sign of slow or informal billing processes rather than a financial problem — but it still looks concerning on paper.
Lenders don't just want to see profitability. They want to see that your billing practices match your actual progress on jobs — because a business that's chronically overbilled can look profitable right up until several jobs finish at the same time and the cash isn't there to cover the gap.
Why building this manually is painful
A proper WIP schedule requires, for every active job: the original contract value plus approved change orders, total costs incurred to date, total amount billed to date, and an estimate of total costs at completion (which requires an accurate remaining-cost forecast, not just historical spend). Pulling this together manually from JobTread and QuickBooks every quarter is a multi-hour exercise that's easy to get wrong — and it needs to be redone every reporting period.
How to automate it
1. Standardize percentage-of-completion inputs
The calculation is only as good as the estimate of total cost at completion. This needs a consistent method — usually cost-to-cost percentage of completion — applied the same way across every job, pulling actual costs directly from JobTread rather than estimates re-guessed each quarter.
2. Connect billing data automatically
Billings to date should pull directly from your invoicing system rather than being manually tallied, which is where transcription errors creep in on a report that lenders scrutinize closely.
3. Generate the schedule on demand
Once the inputs are connected, the WIP schedule itself — with overbilling/underbilling calculated per job — can be generated automatically anytime a lender, bonding company, or your own CFO wants a current snapshot, rather than being a quarterly fire drill.
Why this matters beyond bonding
Even contractors who aren't actively seeking a bonding increase benefit from having this visibility internally. A WIP schedule is often the first place a cash flow problem becomes visible — well before it shows up in your bank balance.
Bank or bonding company asking for a WIP schedule you don't have?
I build automated WIP reporting that pulls live from your JobTread and QuickBooks data, so you can hand over an accurate schedule in minutes instead of building one from scratch every quarter.