The Contractor Cash-Flow System
CashFlow Shield helps contractors forecast cash gaps, track late payments, manage retainage, and know exactly when their next cash crunch is coming — with a date, a dollar amount and a plan, weeks before the bank account tells them.
Almost every contractor asking that question is describing a timing problem in the language of a profit problem. The research says the same thing.
Source: BusinessWire / Built contractor payment research. These are the only industry statistics used anywhere in this product — every other figure in the ebook and the workbooks is a clearly labelled illustrative example. Read those three numbers together and the picture is hard to avoid: seven in ten contractors are waiting longer than they agreed to wait, more than half have turned down profitable work because they couldn't afford to fund it, and the average contractor is quietly adding 8% to their prices as insurance — which means slow payment isn't just costing you interest and stress, it's costing you bids you never won.
Ten files. Three live workbooks. Fourteen templates. Every chapter ends by answering one question: what does the owner do with this? You can have a working 13-week forecast this afternoon.
Seventeen chapters plus four appendices — why profit isn't cash, the Net-60 trap, the danger zone, every tool, five case studies, and the plan for the next thirty days.
Dashboard, 13-week rolling forecast, AR tracker, project forecasts, retainage tracker, acceptance calculator, expenses, reserve and settings. Live formulas throughout.
Sixteen inputs, seven outputs, a mechanical risk rating and a three-scenario stress test. Answers “are we OK?” with a date and a dollar amount instead of a shrug.
Twenty columns, thirteen weeks, colour-coded status. The single highest-value financial habit available to a small contractor — twenty minutes a week once it's built.
Sixteen fields per invoice, five aging buckets assigned automatically, a live dashboard that shows you exactly where your money is stuck and who is holding it.
The money you've already earned and nobody is tracking. Eleven fields, automatic aging, release-condition logging — and the template that actually gets it released.
Thirteen inputs, ten minutes, one of five recommendations — from ACCEPT to DECLINE / DELAY. Replaces “I've got a bad feeling about this” with a number you can explain.
Deposit requests, mobilisation clauses, progress and milestone schedules, terms negotiation, the full overdue ladder, retainage release and final payment — all editable.
24 hours, 72 hours, 7 days, 30 days. Printable, with real checkboxes. Built for the morning you discover a shortfall coming — so you execute a list instead of deciding what to do.
Five steps in a fixed order. Every tool in the toolkit sits at one of these five points — and the whole loop runs again every week, in about twenty minutes.
See the next thirteen weeks, one week at a time.
Find the gap, its size, and the exact date it arrives.
Change terms, billing timing and the work you accept.
Act on the shortfall while the options are still cheap.
Written rules so it holds together when you're busy.
Most cash-flow emergencies in small construction businesses aren't about a lack of money. They're about money that exists, arriving in the wrong week. Once you can see it laid out, the solutions become obvious.
This is the Dashboard tab with the illustrative example data the workbook ships with — type over it with your own and every figure recalculates.
Projected balance stays above your floor for all thirteen weeks. Keep the weekly review running. Change nothing.
Dips below the floor but stays positive. Accelerate collections on your three largest invoices, delay discretionary spending, confirm payment dates in writing.
Goes below zero, or breaches the floor within 21 days. Run the Emergency Cash-Flow Action Plan today. Accept no new work on extended terms.
Illustrative example figures shipped inside the workbook for a fictional contractor — not a benchmark, not an industry average, and not a result from any real business. Every workbook produces estimates built entirely from figures you enter. These are planning tools, not forecasts, and not a guarantee of any outcome.
No subscription, no accounting software, no add-ons. Everything works in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers or LibreOffice, and every template comes as an editable Word document.
What's in the bundle, how to read the spreadsheets, and the three things to do today. Four pages.
124 pages. 17 chapters, 4 appendices, 8 charts and diagrams, all 14 templates in full, 5 worksheets, 7 bonuses and five worked case studies. Supplied as PDF and editable DOCX.
Ten tabs: Start Here, Dashboard, 13-Week Forecast, Accounts Receivable, Project Forecast, Retainage, Project Acceptance, Expenses, Cash Reserve, Settings. Live formulas, data validation, colour-coded status.
Sixteen inputs, a week-by-week profile, seven outputs, an automatic risk rating, and a three-scenario stress test on its own tab.
Eleven weighted factors, an automatic 0–100 score, a banded action plan for each level, and a twelve-month trend tracker that flags improving or worsening.
All 14 templates, the six-message swipe file, the nine-touchpoint follow-up sequence and the negotiation cheat sheet — in Word, so you can adapt every word.
Four phases with real printable checkboxes, a 24-hour worksheet, a priority order for when you can't pay everything, and financing options ranked by total cost.
Your ten cash-flow protection rules on one page, plus the exception rule, an exception log and a quarterly review sheet. Fill in, print, sign.
An hour a day for a week, then week-by-week for a month. Includes the printable Weekly Cash Review sheet.
In the ebook and in an editable Word document. Firm but professional — written to keep the relationship intact while making your position unambiguous.
Plus a six-message late-payment email swipe file and the nine-touchpoint follow-up sequence — Day 0, Day 7, Day 14, Day 21, five days before due, due date, day 1 overdue, day 7 overdue, and management escalation. These are operational business communications, not legal instruments — have any contractual language reviewed by an attorney in your jurisdiction before use.
All of them, including the ones you'd rather not think about. Aging, due dates and status calculate themselves. Then phone the three oldest and ask one question: when is this scheduled to be paid?
(Average weekly fixed outflow × 4) + your largest upcoming obligation + one payroll cycle. Most contractors have never known this number. It changes how every other decision looks.
Sixteen inputs. At the end you know your lowest cash point, the exact date it happens, the size of the hole, and whether you're Green, Yellow or Red.
Push your largest expected payment out by thirty days. Seventy percent of contractors regularly experience payment delays — a 30-day slip isn't a worst case, it's a Tuesday. This is usually the moment the whole thing lands.
An hour a day for a week gives you the full forecast, project-level exposure, the retainage tracker and your written rules. After that it maintains on twenty minutes a week.
1–50 employees, project-based revenue, thin-to-moderate margins, real payroll obligations, and customers who pay in thirty, sixty or ninety days.
Retainage, long closeouts, and money held behind other trades.
Net-60 from one GC who represents half your revenue.
Heavy material packages bought long before the first draw.
Fixtures paid upfront, progress billed monthly.
Equipment deposits and seasonal revenue swings.
Weather delays that move the billing, not the payroll.
Four jobs, four holes, all overlapping.
Seasonal peaks funded out of the off-season reserve.
Labour-heavy, paid weekly, invoiced monthly.
Material-heavy jobs with one dominant customer.
Pay applications, lien waivers, and 90-day cycles.
Any project-based business waiting to be paid.
Who this isn't for: businesses paid at the point of sale with no receivables. Anyone looking for financing, factoring or a loan — this is a planning system, not a lender and not a broker. Anyone wanting bookkeeping software — this sits in front of your accounts, it doesn't replace them. And anyone hoping a spreadsheet will make an unprofitable business profitable: CashFlow Shield fixes timing problems, and it will show you clearly if what you actually have is a margin problem.
Priced against what a single avoided cash crunch is worth — not against an inflated number designed to make a discount look bigger.
Secure checkout · 7-day money-back guarantee
$57 is a fraction of what one missed payroll, one emergency financing arrangement, one late-payment penalty or one turned-down profitable project costs. We're not going to put a number on your savings — we don't know your business, and any figure would be invented. What we will say is this: the system is designed to make the gap visible before it happens, so the options are still the cheap ones.
Thirteen actions on one page, in order, for the moment you discover a shortfall coming. Print it and keep it in the office.
Six ready-to-send messages: day-7 receipt confirmation, day-14 date request, five-days-before, day-1 overdue, day-7 escalation, and the relationship-preserving version.
Six things customers say — “our standard terms are Net-60”, “we don't pay deposits”, “we'll pay when the owner pays us” — and exactly what to say back.
Fourteen fields, twenty minutes, same day every week. The archive becomes a genuinely useful record of how your forecasting accuracy improves.
One page per opportunity, filled in before you price rather than after you've won — including the concurrency check almost nobody runs.
24 hours, 72 hours, 7 days, 30 days — plus the priority order for when you genuinely cannot pay everything, and financing options ranked by total cost rather than headline rate.
Eleven metrics, each with its formula and a healthy range — DSO, AR aging, cash conversion cycle, weeks of cover, current and quick ratio, exposure ratio, retainage exposure and on-time rate.
A residential remodeler on Net-30, a commercial sub on Net-60, a GC buried in retainage, a contractor growing too fast, and a profitable business hit by one bad payer — each with starting position, timeline, intervention, result and lesson. All fictional composites, clearly labelled.
This is a newly published title — reviews are on their way. We don't publish invented ones.
Awaiting first reader review.
Awaiting first reader review.
Awaiting first reader review.
Accounting software is excellent at recording what has happened and terrible at showing you what is about to happen. Almost none of it produces a rolling 13-week weekly cash forecast, a project-level exposure model, a retainage tracker or a project acceptance calculator. This sits in front of your accounts, not instead of them — you'll pull numbers from your accounting system into these tools.
No. Every workbook opens in Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers and LibreOffice, and uses only standard formulas — SUM, IF, SUMIF, MATCH, MAX, MIN and date arithmetic. No macros, no add-ins, no subscription, nothing else to buy.
About seven hours spread over seven days, following the included plan at roughly an hour a day. After that it's twenty minutes a week plus about forty-five minutes a month. If you only have one afternoon, do the AR tracker and the 13-week forecast — around two and a half hours, and it captures most of the value.
It's more relevant, not less. A two-person business has less margin for error, no finance function and usually no line of credit. Use the simplified version: the AR tracker, the 13-week forecast and the deposit rule. About ninety minutes of setup, and it covers the majority of the risk.
No. This is business planning and educational material. It doesn't take account of your specific circumstances and it creates no professional relationship. Every calculator produces estimates from figures you supply — they're planning tools, not forecasts. Consult a qualified accountant, attorney or financial adviser before making decisions about financing, contracts, tax or your business structure.
Yes, and there is exactly one source. The 70%, 56% and 8% figures come from BusinessWire/Built contractor payment research and are cited as such. No other industry statistics appear anywhere in the product. Every dollar figure in every example is clearly labelled as illustrative — built to demonstrate a calculation, not drawn from real businesses and not offered as a benchmark.
No. All five are fictional composites constructed to show how the tools work together, and they're labelled as such wherever they appear. We don't publish invented customer results.
The mechanics are jurisdiction-neutral — cash-flow timing works the same everywhere. What varies is the legal layer: prompt-payment legislation, retainage limits, lien and security-of-payment regimes, notice deadlines and suspension rights. Every template and every chapter that touches these flags it and tells you to check what applies where you work.
Then you have three levers entirely within your control: bill more frequently, submit faster and cleaner, and price the carrying cost in. That last one is what the industry's 8% average bid inflation already represents — the difference is doing it deliberately, and knowing the number, rather than guessing.
Not directly — we're not a lender or a broker and the product doesn't recommend specific products. What it does is give you the two documents lenders actually ask for: a 13-week cash forecast and a clean AR aging report. Chapter 13 also ranks the common financing routes by total cost rather than headline rate, and is explicit about which ones make next quarter harder.
Ask for a deposit or mobilisation payment on every job above a threshold you set. It hits at the exact moment your exposure is growing fastest, it needs no ongoing discipline, and it's negotiated once per contract. Second place: bill twice as often as you do now — it costs your customer nothing and typically drops your peak exposure by 35–50%.
A ZIP containing ten files: four PDFs (the 124-page ebook, a Start Here guide, the printable Emergency Action Plan and the printable 7-Day/30-Day plan), three spreadsheets (the ten-tab Master Workbook, the Cash-Flow Gap Calculator and the Cash-Flow Risk Assessment), two editable Word documents (all 14 templates plus the swipe file, and the Operating Policy) — plus a DOCX version of the full ebook.
If CashFlow Shield isn't useful to you, email sales@viralbydesign.co within 7 days for a full refund — no questions asked.
You don't have to wait until the account is empty to discover a cash-flow problem. Thirteen weeks of forecast, every receivable tracked, every retainage chased, and a number that tells you what you can safely accept.
Get CashFlow Shield — $12.99 →