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Short answer Retainage is a percentage of each progress payment, commonly 5 to 10 percent, that the owner withholds until the job is complete. It's money you've already earned by doing the work. You just haven't been paid it yet. Contractors lose retainage for an unglamorous reason: nobody is tracking it by job. It sits inside accounts receivable as an undifferentiated lump, aging quietly, and at closeout some of it never gets billed at all. Why retainage is different from a

Short answer Your bonding capacity is set by the quality and timeliness of your financial statements, not by how much revenue you do. Sureties underwrite your balance sheet, your working capital, and your work-in-progress schedule. Two contractors with identical revenue can get very different capacity depending on how clean and how current their books are. That means bonding capacity is one of the few growth constraints you can change without winning a single new job. You cha

Short answer JobTread and QuickBooks Online connect through a cost code mapping. JobTread tracks estimates, budgets, and actual costs at the job level. QuickBooks Online holds your general ledger. The integration works when every JobTread cost code has a matching account or item in QBO, so committed costs and actuals post to the right place without anyone re-keying data. The part that goes wrong is almost never the technical connection. It's that the chart of accounts in Quic

There's no single revenue number where a general contractor suddenly needs a fractional controller. But there's a pattern: somewhere between $2M and $10M in annual revenue, the bookkeeping that got you here stops being enough, and most contractors don't notice until something breaks, a job runs over, a bonding renewal gets harder, or cash gets tight despite a full pipeline. Here's the checklist we actually use to tell when a general contractor is ready for a fractional contro

Two general contractors can post the same total revenue and the same total net income for the year, and one of them is actually making money while the other is bleeding out on a job they haven't noticed yet. The difference almost never shows up on the P&L. It shows up in job costing, and it's the single most common gap we find when we start working with a construction business for the first time. What Job Costing Actually Means Job costing is the practice of tracking cost, re

Ask five general contractors how their year is going, and most will point to the P&L. Revenue's up, net income looks fine, everything's tracking. Then a job that looked profitable on paper turns into a cash crunch three months before it wraps, and nobody saw it coming, because the P&L was never built to show it. The tool that would have caught it is the WIP schedule, and if you're not reviewing one every month for every open job, you're flying without the one instrument that