Your bonding company wants a WIP schedule. Your bank wants a WIP schedule. Your CPA needs one for your tax return. And right now, the only time it gets done is in a last-minute scramble at year-end, usually with numbers that are more hopeful than accurate.
That’s a problem. Because a WIP schedule isn’t just a compliance document. It’s the clearest picture you have of whether your jobs are actually making money right now, not six months from now when it’s too late to do anything about it.
What a WIP Schedule Tells You
A Work-in-Progress schedule compares three things on every open job: what you’ve billed, what you’ve earned based on completion, and what you’ve spent. The gap between those numbers tells you whether you’re overbilling or underbilling on each project.
Overbilling means you’ve billed more than the work you’ve completed. That feels good until you realize you’re spending cash you haven’t actually earned yet. Underbilling means you’ve done work you haven’t billed for, which means your cash flow is worse than your profit would suggest.
Most contractors have a mix of both across their open jobs. Without a current WIP, you don’t know which side you’re leaning toward until the cash runs out or the surety sends your financials back with questions.
Why Once-a-Year Isn’t Enough
A WIP schedule prepared once a year at tax time is a historical document. It tells you what happened, not what’s happening. By the time you see the numbers, the jobs are finished, the money is spent, and the overbilling or underbilling has already hit your cash flow.
We prepare WIP schedules regularly, monthly or quarterly depending on your volume and project complexity. That means you catch problems while you can still fix them. A job that’s running 20% over budget in month two is a conversation with your project manager. That same job discovered at year-end is a loss you already ate.
What We Deliver
Percentage-of-completion reporting. Revenue recognized based on actual completion, not just billings received. This is what your surety, your bank, and the IRS care about for accrual-basis contractors.
Over/under billing analysis by job. Every open job, every reporting period. You’ll see exactly where you’re ahead and where you’re behind on billing relative to the work completed.
Estimated cost to complete. For every open project, we work with you to project remaining costs so the schedule reflects reality, not just what’s been spent so far.
Surety-ready formatting. We’ve built WIP schedules that get bond lines approved. We know what your bonding company is looking at, and we make sure your numbers are presented the way they expect to see them.
Who Needs Regular WIP Schedules
Contractors pursuing bonding. If you’re trying to get bonded or increase your bond line, a clean WIP schedule is table stakes. Sureties want to see that you understand your job-level financials, and they want to see it more than once a year.
Contractors bidding larger projects. As project size grows, the financial risk of overbilling or underbilling grows with it. A $50K underbilling on a $2M job is manageable. That same underbilling on a $200K job is the difference between profit and loss.
Any contractor who wants to know the truth about their jobs. Even if bonding isn’t on your radar, a WIP schedule is the most honest look at your financial position you can get. It cuts through the noise of billing timing and shows you what’s actually happening.
How It Works With Us
We pull your job cost data, your billing history, and your estimated costs to complete. We reconcile everything against your general ledger. Then we produce a WIP schedule that’s clean, accurate, and ready for whoever needs to see it.
If your job cost tracking isn’t set up well enough to support WIP reporting, we fix that first. See our job cost setup & tracking service. No point building a schedule on bad data. We’ll get your cost codes and job structure right, then layer the WIP process on top.
Get WIP-Ready
Let us look at your current job costing and financial structure. We’ll tell you honestly whether you’re ready for WIP reporting or what needs to happen first. Either way, you’ll have a clear path forward.