Name: Get Paid Faster with Cash Flow Management
Uploaded: 2026-09-22T19:33:06.547Z
Duration: 50 min 24 s
Description: Get Paid Faster with Cash Flow Management

Transcript for "Get Paid Faster with Cash Flow Management": Good afternoon or good morning, depending on what time zone you're joining us from, and welcome to today's webinar. We'll get started in just a moment. Before we get started, a couple quick housekeeping notes. For the best experience, please use Google Chrome or Firefox. The audio for today's presentation is streamed through your computer. There's no dial in, so please make sure the volume is turned up. You can download the presentation slides in the resource widget, and please note that you will receive an email with a link to the on demand recording for today's presentation once the session, within twenty four hours after the session ends. This is part of our construction accounting university series, so you could not only watch this one back, but you'd be able to watch any of the other previous sessions in the series as well. Today's topic is all about getting paid faster with cash flow management. Quick introduction. I am your host for today's webinar. I'm John Ivers, the vice president general manager here at Deltek Computorees. I have over thirty five years of experience working in the construction industry. Started my career in construction, working for a large mechanical contractor, held various roles over my ten years there, and I've spent the last twenty five plus years serving the over 6,000 contractors nationwide as the leader of the Deltek ComputerEase team. A lot of my role here today at Deltek ComputerEase is focused on equipping contractors with the tools they need to manage profitability, drive growth, and meet the ever changing complex construction requirements. What we'll learn in today's webinar, we'll talk about the different billing methods that can be used or, you know, various construction specific billing methods that are, you know, that we use. And it's, you know, it's really important that we use the right, the right method, the right forms, send the bills to the right place. We'll talk about all that. How to create the, you know, the smoothest cash flow experience we can from the initial contract all the way through to the final retainage payment, and that's certainly something that we we wanna talk about. Best practices for collecting receivables to ensure we get paid timely, how to manage retainage, you know, how to to hopefully, ideally, get retainage reduced throughout the life of the job, and then certainly what's gonna be required at the end to get that final retainage payment released. And we don't wanna leave retainage, you know, on the table and walk away from what may seem like a few dollars in that final retainage payment because we didn't, you know, check a box, cross it, you know, cross a t or dot an I. And then what are some of the critical, you know, reports we should be looking at to to spot, you know, drains on our cash flow? You know, as we know, cash flow is is certainly going to always be a problem in construction. A lot of times, we are spending money long before we ever can bill, much less get paid. So each job typically is going to start in a negative cash position. We wanna get that to a net positive position as soon as we can, and we certainly wanna keep our eye out for jobs that are causing a drain on our cash flow. So before we get the... Any further, I wanna just launch a quick polling question here real quick. We'd like to know who we have in our audience today. So I'd like to know what is your current accounting or construction ERP system. I'm gonna go ahead and launch that poll. I'm gonna open the poll and just check the appropriate box. Maybe you're using Deltek Computer Aids. If you are, certainly, we thank you for your business and appreciate your support. Maybe you're using Foundation, maybe you're using Jonas, maybe you're using QuickBooks, Sage, Viewpoint, or other. We'll leave that open for twenty, twenty five seconds, give everybody a chance to answer, and then we'll go ahead and dive in. Give it about another fifteen seconds. And I'm gonna go ahead and close-up the poll. We got a good... Looks like a good selection of, people using different softwares across the, across the polling questionnaire. So we got a good number on Computeres, good number on QuickBooks, and then certainly, you know, a handful on, you know, Foundation Sage, Viewpoint, and some on others. So, yeah, kind of a wide variety, so that's great. We'll talk about, you know, some of the best practices that, you know, regardless of the system you're using. And, certainly, later on, we're gonna take a look at some examples of some things that could be helpful to you, from the computer ecosystem because, obviously, that's what I'm certainly familiar with. But the things we're gonna talk about today, think, are important regardless of the system that you're using. Alright. So let's talk about just some of the challenges we face in cash flow. I mean, you know, as as I said, you know, it's it's very problematic for us as a contractor. We start with the... You know, typically, every job starts in that negative cash position. Regardless of how strong your backlog is, how profitable your jobs are, we have to properly manage cash flow. If not, we can run into serious problem because there are certain things, you know, payroll certainly being a lot of times for... Especially those that are very labor intensive, you know, we're we're gonna have to make payroll every week, and that can be a sizable number regardless of whether we're getting paid or not. You know, you have some flexibility a lot of times with your subs or even suppliers. You know, you can... With your subs, maybe it's pay when paid, so you're gonna pay them when you get paid. Suppliers, you you know, you have some, you know, some flexibility there. Although, I'm gonna talk about... One of the things I wanna talk about is don't overlook the value of a prompt pay discount. A lot of your material suppliers, as an example, will give you a discount. You know, if you pay by the tenth of the next month, you might be 2%, you know, tenth of the next month. Well, even... You may not have been paid for that job, so, you know, one would think I'm gonna delay paying the supplier, but that 2% discount is worth considerably more in in most, if not all cases, than maybe what you might pay to, you know, dip into your line of credit to go ahead and pay that vendor in advance of you getting paid. So all things you wanna think about. Doesn't doesn't, you know, necessarily always make sense and certainly depending on, you know, what, what your line of credit looks like, where you're at with as far as into your line of credit. But, you know, don't overlook the fact that the money you may need to borrow to pay a supplier to take the prompt pay discount, you know, the the discount is gonna far outweigh the the interest you're gonna pay on that short term, you know, on that short term dip into line of credit. So just something we wanna think about. You know, it... It's it's going to be a, you know, constant, you know, battle to to to chase money coming in, you know, try to control money going out. Like I said, there there there are certain things in our industry, though, that you're very hard to avoid, and that's meeting payroll. That's one thing that we don't really have much flexibility in. So, you know... But we, you know, we can manage some of the other payments, but it's it's it's a constant battle, you know, chasing money coming in, balancing the flow of money going out, and trying to keep us in a positive cash position. You know? So it's really critical, you know, as far as cash coming in to make sure you had... You're you're following, you know, best practices for billing. Make sure you're billing on the right form, sending it to the right person, and sending it on time. Those are those are the three, you know, you know, three critical things I think that are very important in construction. And too many times, you know, the bill's on the wrong form, sent to the wrong person, and sent at the wrong time. Well, guess what? That's almost always gonna cause a delay in your in your invoice, your your pay request getting approved, and, ultimately, you're getting paid. So really something that we wanna make sure. And, you know, when when back in my days in construction, I always, you know, had a... I I I knew from beginning to end, you know, what... How do I need to bill? Who do I need to bill? Who do I need to get the invoice to? And and when does it need to be there? And then, also, who's going to... Who has control over when I get paid? You know? And I wanna I wanna follow that from beginning to end. And, you know, a lot of times, my best friend on the other side was the person that could control me getting that money. And and sometimes a day or two is all it takes to help me, you know, make make payroll that week as an example. If I can get paid a day or two sooner because I've I've established a good a good report, a good workflow between, you know, the the... For the bill, the billing cycle can mean all the difference in the world. You know, as I mentioned, you know, some of the challenges we face in construction, you know, it... You know, we are doing work long before we can bill for the work. You know, we need to make sure we are billing for everything that we've done. You know, don't... The fact that I even get an invoice doesn't mean that we haven't done the work. Make sure that we're billing. Yeah. I don't wanna... We'll talk about over and under billing when it comes to WIP here in a minute, but I certainly don't wanna be underbilled. I don't wanna bill for less work than we have completed. And, you know, sometimes the cutoff... Depending on the cutoff each month, you know, you need to make sure we're controlling. We're we're aware of all the costs for a given billing period, and we're we're including all that in our pay request. You know, if we don't have cash on hand, it could it could certainly impact our ability to to meet payroll, to cover, you know, cover expenses. I think it's critical that you establish and have a line of credit, you know, if and when you need it. Maybe you're not gonna need it, but the, you know, the the time to establish a line of credit is probably... Is the best time is when you don't necessarily need it so that you have it when you need it. You know, you don't wanna wait until you come up against a a cash flow situation. All of a sudden, now you're scrambling to maybe initiate or create a line of credit and... That that that you can use. So, you know, just because you don't need it now doesn't mean you won't need it. So don't, you know, don't be caught in that situation where when you need it, then you're you're struggling to get it in place. We're gonna look at it. We'll see some examples of that here in a minute. I wanna look at the cash flow across all the jobs. Now I don't wanna be funding any jobs any longer than I have to, and we'll see why that's important. I mean, there's there's billings to date and there's cost to date. There's cash received to date and there's cash spent to date on the job, and those are two different things. Regardless of what I have billed, how much have I collected, regardless of what I have been billed, my expenses, what have I actually paid out? And, and the net the net of collected minus paid out is the is the net cash flow on that job. You know, overbilling and underbilling certainly has... You know, plays a a part in this. Certainly, overbilling is when we are billing ahead of work completed. If managed properly, you know, but that... That's very critical. If managed properly, overbilling can have a tremendous positive effect on cash flow. So, you know... But I have I have the ability to bill for and get paid for some work that I haven't yet completed. But if unmanaged, it can be problematic because you won't have the available cash to fund the remaining work. What you cannot do is confuse overbillings with profit. Assume that because we have now billed and and later on collected that money, that is ours to spend. That is profit. That not the case. You know, it's why, you know, why does the surety underwriter or the banker, when you go to get that line of credit or you go to get a bond, why does the the the surety company, the surety underwriter, the bonding agent, why do they wanna see a work in progress schedule along with your financial statement? They wanna make sure if you're overbilled, that's okay, but it's represented on the balance sheet and you have a healthy balance sheet to support that overbilling because, you know, they're... They are very fearful of that common mistake that we will confuse overbillings with profit and assume that's money we have to spend when it's not. It's money that we need to fund the work that we have yet to do. So very crucial. You you know, that's why you can't... To me in construction, you can't prepare financial statements without the corresponding work in progress schedule, which clearly calculates and calls out the year over under billing. And and then also you have to have those entries made on the corresponding financial statements. I need to record the adjustment to revenue over or under billed, over billing. I gotta reduce revenue on the p and l. Under billing, I need to increase revenue. And then I have a... The offsetting entry to that is on the balance sheet. Overbilling is a liability because I'm gonna have collected money for work that I have yet to do, so I have a liability to come back and perform that work. Underbilling will be will be an asset as I've done work that I haven't billed or will be paid for that, becomes an asset. So very important that there's a... There's direct relationship between the WIP schedule and the financial statements as far as the over under billing goes. And we'll see some examples of that here in a minute. Construction, you know, once again, it's important to understand what is the bill gonna look like, what method are we using for billing. So we have, you know, one example will be a a a progress bill. You know, we're gonna bill for a percentage of the work completed against the schedule of values or, you know, and, ultimately, the total contract value. The forms could be on, you know, kind of a standard... The standard AIA g seven zero two or g seven zero three form a lot of us would be familiar with. There's also certainly many variations of that. A lot of times, you know, if we're a subcontractor working for a general, they're gonna... You know, maybe they're gonna have their own version of the cover sheet, the g seven zero two, and then they're gonna, you know, have a very similar schedule values, your billing detail on on something similar to the seven zero three. So whether it's on the official AIA billing form or something similar, you know, progress bill says, you know, we've got the line items, and we'll see some examples of this here in just a few minutes, and we're gonna bill for a certain percentage of each of those line items on this month's pay request. You know, some of you may be doing work that you're you're getting paid, you're billing and getting paid by the unit. DOT work is a great example of that, you know, you know, where you're gonna get paid a fixed price per piece per unit of work that is done, whether it's a, you know, foot of guardrail, you know, a cubic yard of dirt, whatever the whatever the the measurable unit may be, you have a contract that says we're going to pay you x per unit of work. A lot of times in in the DOT example, you know, a lot of times they're telling you what they're going to pay you, you know, where, you you know, you're not necessarily submitting, I wanna be paid for this amount of work. There... A lot of times they're going to dictate what they're going to pay you. But, you know, and we're gonna record that. But at the end of the day, we're gonna produce a bill that says, you know, I did x number of units at agreed upon contract price, and that is what I'm gonna be paid certainly, you know, and then retain each good factor in there as well. And then a lot of us, you know, might be doing jobs at time and material or or cost plus, where we're we're billing for, you know, actual cost of material plus a markup. We're billing for a a agreed upon hourly labor rate for various types of labor. You know, so what we typically call time, material, or cost plus. And those, once again, you know, a lot of times, you're providing that, plus, you know, supporting detail, and and those bills are important. It's really important that if you're doing time material billing that you have a system that's not going to allow any of those invoices fall through the cracks where... You know, a lot of times, I've seen where, you know, your your time and material cutoff maybe is, let's say, it's the twenty fifth of the month. Well, you generate the bill, and then an invoice comes in dated the twenty fourth after you've already produced the bill. And now because the cutoff was the twenty fifth, when you go to bill next month, that invoice slips through the cracks. The system like Computore's, you know, that that is not... That's not the case. We're we're gonna... You know, we know what has not been billed regardless of the date. When you go to do next month's time material billing, it's gonna pull in all invoices that have... They have not been marked as billed previously. So gives you a chance to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks. So once again, important that you understand the the format that they want the time and material bill on. You understand the rates. You have everything prepared as it should be. So what are some of the best practices to make sure we're doing this? You know? So, certainly, you know, before you sign a contract, understand what you're signing. Know what payment terms are. Or or know what the payment process is. A lot of this is spelled out in the contract. You know? Certainly, you wanna understand the retainage. You understand what, you know, what are the what are the retainage rates? What are the options for reducing retainage throughout the life of the job? All this, you know, certainly, you know, potentially can be negotiated before you sign a contract. Once you sign a contract, if you have agreed to something that you later become a little leery of, it's gonna be a little bit too late to go back and try to to negotiate that. So please make sure you understand the billing process, the procedures, you know, how you're gonna bill, who you're gonna bill, when you're gonna bill, what are the retainage... The rules around retainage. Make sure all that's covered. You know, understand what the... What are the rules for change orders. All this is spelled out in the in the contract, and you surely wanna be wary of any, you know, no lien contracts or or or something that is is... Where you're waiving all of your lien rights upfront. I mean, the lien rights are very important should there be an issue. You know, you wanna make sure you have, ideally, in the contract, it... It's spelled out that you you are able to lower your retainings throughout the life of the job. So maybe it starts at 10%, but there's... There are options in there to get that reduced. If you're unsure about a cause in the contract, ask the question. Consult an expert. Consult one of your... You know, someone on your team, someone on your extended team. You know, ideally, you know, you have, you know, your your your CPA, your, you know, your legal team, you know, outside trusted advisers that work with your company. If you're unsure about something in a contract, don't just sign it and ask later. Ask those questions upfront. I mean, you don't wanna get into a situation where you unfortunately agreed to something that you know... That later on you realize you weren't really comfortable with. Because at the end of the day, you're gonna do the work, but you need to be paid for the work you need to be paid, you know, in in as... In an orderly fashion as we can and certainly as timely as we can. Make sure you understand all that upfront. Understand the rules around billing and payments, and things will will go a heck of a lot smoother. You know, as I said, you know, the the... To me, the key are the four r's of billing. The right person, you know, who's your point of contact? Who does that bill go to? I wanna make sure that that bill goes to John. It's going to John. I verified that John got the bill. It goes to the right place. You know, how do you wanna receive the bill? What does that look like? It's on the right form. What are the forms I need to use? What are the billing forms? What do you expect to see? And make sure it's on time. So right person, right place, right form, and right time. And if you follow those four things and understand that all upfront, make sure you identify, you connect with the right person, you connect and make sure, okay, this bill goes to you. Correct? It's gonna go... Here's where I'm gonna send it. Here's what form it's gonna be on, and when do you need it by. And I wanna make sure I have that, and I would have that laid out on every job that we had so I knew exactly, you know, where the bill went, what it needed to look like, and when it needed to be there. So if somebody, for whatever reason, you know, wasn't here that month, I mean, there was no chance that a bill wasn't gonna go out for that job because somebody on our team, internal team, happened to be out on vacation. We had a master calendar for the billing, and we knew on every job what the, you know, the the four r's of billing. And we're gonna make sure just because the project manager might be out this week, but the bill is due, doesn't mean we're gonna... Well, you know, I'm sorry we didn't get it to you on time. There there... I'm not gonna... You know, I certainly don't wanna have to to try to plead my case and say, well, I didn't get you the bill on time. Because a lot of times, the answer is gonna be, I'm sorry. You missed the cutoff. That'll have to go into next month. You know, you certainly wanna manage your receivables. You wanna be on top of your receivables. You know? You wanna review your receivables at a minimum on a weekly basis. You know? Ideally, you're you're looking at that every day. You know? You wanna make sure that the person on your team that's in charge of collections certainly has... Ideally, has experience in construction and and managing collections. They have the right temperament. I mean, it doesn't... You know, I wanna I wanna befriend the person on the other end that I'm gonna get paid from... I... You know, it doesn't mean I can't be firm. You know, sometimes it does take a firm commanding individual, but they also have... But they... You know, there's a line that you can't cross, so you're... Otherwise, you're gonna get into a a confrontational situation or a situation where somebody on the other end, you know, has a lot of control over when you get paid. And if they just sit on things for a day or two, that's a day or two that I I I can't afford to have them sitting on that. So make sure you have the right person. I think it's good, you know, to to review with whoever is responsible within your organization for the receivables and make sure that they that they have the right, you know, the right mindset to do this, and they can they can manage that properly. And if we do that, like I said, doesn't mean we're gonna roll over. You know, there... There's times we're gonna have to be firm and very commanding to make sure that we get what we're entitled to. But we also... You know, I've I've seen situations where it becomes, you know, a confrontational situation, and all of a sudden I create an enemy on the other side. At the end of the day, I don't think it's ever a good idea to create an enemy for the person who's gonna ultimately hand me money. So let's let's do what we can be, you know, be be firm and commanding when when need be, but also make sure you build that relationship to help improve the cash flow. You know, retaining is a big part of what we do. And a lot of times, you know, like, the, you know, a chunk of our bottom line, our final profit is tied up in that retainage, the the final retainage release. You know, certainly, as we talked about before, understand the rules around retainage going into the job. You know, if you can reduce retainage along the the the life of the job, that's certainly, you know, what we wanna do. Make sure you understand what's required at the end of the job to get the final retainage released. A lot of times, it's, you know, the closeout docs, the warranties, the, you know, the the as builts, etcetera. I mean, you know, the punch list items. Make sure you... As a... In your company, it's a priority to tie up loose ends. It's real easy. If I'm, you know, if I'm a project manager on a job, I'm I'm the the superintendent, whoever it might be, someone that's in... Responsible for that job. You know, we're at the end. There's a couple a couple loose ends we need to tie up, but I'm on to the next big job a lot of times. You know, I've I've already moved on to the next job, and I gotta get my next job going. I gotta get it out of the ground. I gotta get things moving. And and it's it's real. Sometimes it's hard to go back and tie up those loose ends, but you've gotta you... We gotta make that a priority, and it's gotta start from the from the top down. And we gotta make that part of our company culture is that we tie up all the loose ends. Because at the end of the day, if we don't, we're not going to get that final payment released. And there... There's a reason for retainings, and it's exactly that... It's exactly for that reason. If not, people would walk away from those those last few loose ends and move on to the next job. So just make sure we don't fall into that trap. I've gone into companies, and I've seen where we got, you know, a number of jobs that are all being completed. They're... You know, but there's, you know, a small amount of retainage outstanding on each one of those. Well, I... That can add up. Any... Just one job can be significant. But imagine you got multiple jobs, and there's just, you know, a loose end or two on each of those each of those jobs that's preventing you from getting that final retainage payment. Make sure that you have a handle on the change orders. You know, make sure there are no unapproved change orders hanging out there. You know, ideally, you're doing this, you know, well before you get to that that final pay request, but that's why, you know, we need to be tracking change orders from the time we initiate them, that we have a request. So we we are tracking unapproved change orders. You know, too many times, I've seen people... We only we only start tracking change orders, you know, on the accounting side of things once they get approved. Well, certainly, we need to record the approved change orders after the fact, but I wanna know which change orders are out there waiting to be approved so that I can make sure I am following up. Have we done the work? Are we not gonna do the work? Is, you know, has has it been... That change order been rejected? But what I don't want is a change order hanging out there, and I don't know whether we've actually done the work or not We're at the end of the job, and I don't have an approved change order that I can bill for. You know? Make sure you understand the, you know, the the punch list items and prioritize completing that. And then, certainly, you know, all the other closeout docs that are required, the as builts or warranties, etcetera, make sure we do that. I mean, you know, it's... You know, you wanna get everything completed as quickly as possible. Understand, hey. What is required for me to get the final retainage payment released? And make sure we we go down the list and we check those things off, and we work with our team to make sure that that that we meet our obligations and ultimately get, you know, get our final payment. And like I said, that the longer that sits out there, the tougher it is to to to go back and and all of a sudden what was a loose end or two becomes multiple loose ends or one thing has led to another. And before you know it, it's very difficult to go back. So the sooner you do it, the the better chance you have of getting it completed, in in an orderly fashion and getting paid. You know, what tools are you using to, you know, to track your cash flow? You know, we're gonna see some examples in computers here in a few minutes, but, you know, how are you managing... How are you doing your billing? You know, the... Whether it's a progress billing, a unit bill, time and material bill. You know, what kind of reporting do you have to track your open receivables, track your unbilled retainage on the job? You know, once you bill for the retainage, are you... You know, how are you seeing that on your receivables? Is that separate from the, you know, the nonretainees receivables? You know, what kind of reporting do you have? So these are all important things to, you know, being able to, you know, have the right tools to help you manage the, you know, manage the cash flow within within your company. You know, some reports that I think are certainly all important here, certainly aging reports, both AR and AP, discount report. Like I said, don't underestimate the value of the discount, and you wanna make sure I understand. Maybe there maybe there are reasons that you're not gonna take a prompt pay discount, but I wanna understand what I lost by not taking the prompt pay discount. Certainly, on the financial statements, you know, the the the balance sheet, you know, it needs to clearly identify the cash balance. You know, certainly, our under billing, you know, liabilities or assets, line of credit liability, how much we're into our line of credit, things like that. Those are all things that I think are are crucial to properly managing cash flow. So with that, I wanna take the next few minutes. I wanna go into ComputeRees and just give some examples of what a tool like ComputeRees can do to help you manage, you know, some of these, some of these cash flow requirements or the complexity and and management of the cash flow, the change orders, etcetera. So I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen here for a minute, and we'll go ahead and take a look at Go ahead and bring up my computer. It's like I said... And regardless of the system you're using, I mean, you know, you could... You know, this can be done in any of the systems. You know, some, I think, are better at it than others. I think one of the reasons I'm a big big believer in using a system that was built for the construction industry like Computerese, I mean, that's the only industry that Computerese serves, is that it's gonna... It understands the concept of retainage. It understands all the things we just talked about, and it can help us with the reporting. It can help us with the management of all these things. So I'm gonna look... We're gonna look at a couple different things here. One, you know, certainly, we talk about being able to look at, you know, our our aging report. I wanna look at my, you know, my AR aging. I wanna see, okay, a list of all the invoices. You know, who who owes me? You know, how long has it been out there? You know, I clearly can identify the build retainings. We'll talk about unbilled retainings here in a minute. So, you know, it's certainly a... Is a receivable, but it's gonna show in the retention column so I can clearly see, okay, that was retainings we billed for on that particular job. You know, I want I want the ability to add notes on... As I'm making collection calls on these invoices, I wanna be able to go ahead and put a note in here that on, you know, 09/22... So when somebody else, you know, the... You know, someone else in management or ownership of the company takes a look at that, they're gonna clearly see that there's... You know, that, okay. I've made my collection calls, and here's what they've told me. I wanna be able to drill down and take a look at the invoice. If I, you know, if I wanna see the invoice, you know, I wanna be able to go see the invoice. And whether it's something like this where we're billing on a progress billing and we're gonna bill on the, you know, the the g seven zero two, g seven zero three format or whether it's a time and material invoice or whether it's a unit billing invoice. I wanna be able to drill down and get to the actual invoice itself right there from my my collection report. So somebody needs to get a copy of an invoice, I can send that over right away. You know, I wanna see on the AP side, who do I owe and how long how long have these invoices been out there? And, you know, if I'm holding retention, I would see that clearly noted as well. I wanna see the unbilled retainings. We talked about being being able to see unbilled retention by job. I can see, you know, the detailed list of the unbilled retainage. In this case, I got unbilled retainage on, you know, on on two different jobs, and, you know, I can see the the total of the unbilled retainage, and I can see it broken out. You know? 86,000 on one job and 23 on the other for a total of $10.09. So I know what retainage is out there that I haven't yet billed for, and it's really important that we're we're tracking that. Remember, if I I bill for a $100,000 or holding 10% retainage, You know, I'm I'm billing a 100. A 100,000 goes to build revenue, 90,000 goes to AR, and 10,000 goes to to retainage AR, which essentially is a future receivable. So, you know, I wanna make sure that I'm able to see that. I wanna be able to see... You know, we talked about the, you know, the the discount reports. I wanna be able to see, you know, discounts and evaluate discounts that I've... That I have taken or that I have not taken. So, you know, if I go and look at my, discount report, I can see, you know, list of all the discounts that I've been... That I've taken, you know, over a period of time, what we've taken, what's upcoming, what's been lost, all that year to date. So those are... I think those are some of the, you know, some of the critical reports. We talked about, you know, work in progress and the over under billing and how important that is. I mean, here's, you know, here's the WIP dashboard within Computery. So I'm tracking the over under billing across all jobs. I could look at that certainly in a more of a report view. But here, I can see every job. I can see the over under billing. You know? I can see the cash flow, the true cash in and cash out, you know, not only company wide but in across the company. And I'm looking for, you know, those jobs that are producing negative cash flow. You know, I can see which jobs are overbilled, which jobs are underbilled, which jobs have projected profit, which jobs have a negative cash flow. Makes it very easy, and then I can go and look at that one particular job and see exactly where we're at. Well, here, we're certainly... We're under build, so it's no surprise in this example that I have negative cash flow. I would expect to see that when I'm under build. I would expect to see cash flow being on the negative side. You know, I can run the, you know, I can run the work in progress report and and have it include the cash flow on here as well. So here's what I build, and here's what I've spent to date. But here's the true cash in and cash out and the actual cash flow job by job. So, overall, you know, the the jobs are producing positive cash flow, but I have some jobs that are still producing negative cash flow. I wanna make sure that I'm looking into that. So those are just, you know, couple examples of of some of the reports that we're that we're gonna take a... That we wanna be able to easily take a look at. I wanna be able to see, you know, when I'm looking at, you know, my financial dashboard, I'm looking at the, you know, my balance sheet or my my profit and loss statement. I wanna I wanna clearly see, you know, things spelled out. I wanna be able to see on the on the balance sheet as an example. I wanna be able to see the over under billing. You know? I wanna I wanna see the, you know, the retention on there. I wanna be able to see these things on the on the financial statement on the on the balance sheet as well. So that's all, you know, all part of managing, you know, managing the the finances and the cash flow across the company. You know, I think the, you know, the, you know, the the big thing... And I'll go... We'll look at a couple other different formats here. We look at some of the different... We looked at a... An AIA billing format. Here's a job where I'm getting paid on a a unit basis. So if I were to look at the, you know, the job for invoice for this particular job, it's gonna look slightly different. Where here, I'm getting paid on the per unit. You know, how much am I getting paid per unit? And that that pay application's gonna look a little bit different than the, you know, than the the progress billing. Or if I have a job that's t and m, I wanna make sure I have the right t and m rates set up. If I go in and I'm doing a job on a on a t and m basis, I wanna make sure that when I go in and I set the job up, I can properly identify what are the billing rates. You know, how much am I getting paid per hour and that... You know, we have the ability to set that all up in the, you know, in the job master file itself where I can say, okay. Well, on this particular job, you know, here's the here's the billing rates we're using, and and here's the agreed upon pay rates based on the the type of work we're performing. So just, you know, a couple quick high level examples of, you know, what what I think we, you know, we need to be able to look at in the system. We need to be able to go back and look at reports as of a previous point in time. So maybe I wanna go back and look at my aging report, but I wanna be able to see that as of... Where were we at the end of... I'll just go back to the end of last year as an example. Okay. Show me the aging as of the end of last year. That's gonna be different than what it looks like today. I wanna be able to go back and see these reports at, you know, at any at any particular point in time, and this is telling me this is my aging report as of December 2025. So just some examples of how the reports in computers work. And so this... You know, depending on the system you're using, you know, these these... You know, your... You know, these reports may vary, but these are, you know, some some of the common reports I think are critical for us to use in construction. And and I, you know, I can't say enough about the, you know, the whole WIP process and how that impacts, you know, certainly cash flow because the over under billing... You know, over billing certainly is not a bad thing. It's a great thing for cash flow, but we have to manage that. We have to manage that. Underbilling is a horrible thing for cash flow. If I haven't even at least billed for the amount of work that I've completed, well, certainly, I'm probably gonna be in a in a negative cash position. So, ideally, I'm more in the overbilled position, which is, once again, fine for cash flow as long as I recognize the overbilling amount on this particular job as an example. I need to recognize that overbilling amount as what it is, a reduction in revenue and a... And an increase in my liability because I'm a be paid for work that I will need to perform later. So just a couple... You know, those are a couple things. You know? The one other thing I wanna touch on real quick when we talk about billing is, you know, the schedule of values. Think about the schedule of values. When you're creating a schedule of values, it's not just throwing a bunch of numbers on a on a piece of paper and get the schedule approved. I mean, I... There's some strategy behind setting up your schedule of values and assigning the the the dollar amounts to each item on the schedule values. And, you know, it's it's not the... You know, I I wanna maybe, you know, front load the the the schedule a little bit for the things that are gonna be completed earlier on. I've... If I can weight those a little bit more, then things are gonna be completed at the tail end. I got a chance to get paid on, a little bit more on those things upfront. So there's certainly... I think there... There's an art to properly building a schedule of values, and don't just take that for granted and throw a bunch of numbers on a on a on a schedule just to to to get it, to get it approved and get it out the door. So think about there. There's a strategy to building that. So those are just some of the things that can help with certainly the cash flow. I think the the key to all this is having a system that will help you with this, that can put it all in one place, allow you to manage everything. You know, like I said, whether you're looking at just an individual job, but as a... You know, from from the top down, as the owner of the construction company, I wanna manage all jobs. As a project manager, I wanna manage all of my jobs, and I wanna have some place where I can go and see everything about this job, cash flow, projected profit, projected cost, profitability, and it's gonna clearly spell out where we're at. And if, you know, my job's in a negative cash position, I wanna... I certainly need to look at that. I wanna see, you know, the re... The retainage on the job, the unbilled retainage. Once again, I can drill down and say, okay. Yep. I've got $23,000 in unbilled retainage on this job. So this is kind of the the scorecard for managing this job, and it's it's important that we impress upon everybody in our organizations the importance of cash flow. And that's... You know, it is... This isn't just accounting or project management or ownership. It's all all aspects of the company working together to make sure that we're doing everything we can to get paid as much as we can as quickly as we can. So I wanna make sure I'm getting paid on time and, you know, for, you know, at least for the amount of work I did. Ideally, you know, if I'm if I'm overbilled, that's certainly not a bad thing once... As long as I recognize that. So, you know, if everybody, you know, everybody looks at this, you know, and the way, you know, I think I always looked at it was, hey. You know, treat this as if, you know, as if this is your own. You know? It's not the company's money. It's it's ours. And I have I have responsibility to spend wisely and to and and to make sure that we that we collect, you know, in in a proper, you know, in a proper time frame. So, you know, I think it's really important. And if if everybody treats this and works together to, you know, lessen the... Some of the cash flow challenges we have, you know, that can be that can be a great thing. I mean, we, you know, we wanna look at, you know, things, look at the upcoming expenses, look at what payroll is. I mean, you know, we can do things. You know, there's some, you know, reports in in ComputeRees, for example, where I wanna I wanna look at the I wanna look at the cash flow, and I just wanna... I wanna look at what, you know, what is what is coming. If, you know, if I wanna go and I'm looking at the... You know, if I go to the... I'll go back over here to my financial center, and maybe I wanna look at the, you know, I wanna look at the, you know, the the cash flow. I wanna look at what's coming up. You know, what do I, you know, what do I have? You know, what's the... You know, what do I have as, available on my line of credit? What is what is upcoming as far as, you know, payables, receivables, expected payroll? Those are all things we can manage. And if we put if we put a good process in place to do that, I think we give us... Give ourselves the best chance for success, and we can battle some of the cash flow problems and challenges. But if you, you know, if you leave with one thing, make sure you understand. To get paid faster, don't forget the four r's of billing. You know? Right person, right place, right form, right time. If you remember that and that alone, that... And that is... I mean, every job, long before the job starts, soon as we get a contract, I wanna... I'm gonna understand what that is, and I'm gonna make sure that I know everything about the four r's of billing because, you know, missing one of those components can delay the billing process, the payment process. And, you know, our goal is to get paid sooner, not the... Not later. So if we do that, if you remember those, you know, the the four r's of billing, I think that that can go a long, long way to ensuring your success. So with that, I'm gonna come back to the, to the slide deck. We'll open it up to some questions here. Let me go ahead and come back here to the slides. And I'm gonna go ahead and launch one more polling question here. So give me just a moment. Alright. So we've had a lot of interest from our Construction Accounting University series about, you know, people expressing interest in earning CPE credits for attending these educational sessions. So so I'm gonna launch a quick polling question because I would look... We would just love to know of those in the audience today how many would be interested in receiving CPE credits for the content, not only today's session, but other sessions. You know, we're... We don't, you know, we don't have the ability to do that yet today, but we're going to be implementing that sometime, hopefully, in the future. But just kinda curious, looks like it's, you know, about a seventy thirty split. 70% would like to get credits and 30%, c p... CP credits are not, you know, not relevant, to them. So, yeah, appreciate the update. I'll give that another five, ten seconds or so here. I'm gonna go ahead and close that poll. And I'm gonna launch one last polling question here while I go ahead and take some questions from the audience. But if you, you know, if you'd like to be contacted to learn more about Computerease, talk about, you know, some of these things, maybe you're not using Computerease today, but you'd like to learn more about the system and and take advantage of some of the great, you know, the the great construction reporting and some of the things we have, you know, in Computerease. We'd be more than happy to reach out and speak with anybody individually and do a little more in-depth presentation or discussion around around Computerease. But while we're doing that, while I leave that polling question up for another ten seconds or so, I'm gonna go ahead and get into some questions here. I'm gonna go ahead and close that poll real quick, and then I'm just gonna put up some general contact information while I go ahead and get into some of the the questions and answers. So just a quick note before I do that, you know, our next session in the series here is October 20, and it's all about managing construction payroll complexities. You can certainly go to our series at any time, deltek.com/cau. And if you have any questions, you can certainly contact us at the contact information on the screen. But while we're doing that, I'm gonna go ahead and take some questions here. I got some from the audience, some that were presubmitted, and some that have come in here in the chat. So just give me a minute here to go through these. Question here about overbilling. Wouldn't overbilling be construed as false claims? You know, some serious overbilling maybe, could be. I mean, you know, we're we're not talking about, you know, claiming to to be 80% complete when we're 10% complete. We're talking about, you know, the... I think the best in class contractor, you know, can can maybe justify and and maybe, you know, maybe we've only done 10% of the work, but we're billing for 12% of the work. So, I mean, it it... Not necessarily we're making a false claim. It's just that we're maybe a little little more aggressive on the billing than, than than maybe we we could be. And I think that's, that's certainly a benefit. I'm not, you know, certainly not, you know, encouraging anybody to make any false claims, but I think the... You know, it's really hard sometimes to differentiate between ten and twelve percent. Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna go with the 12 when... If there's a difference between ten and twelve, I'd rather be slightly overbilled than slightly underbilled. Are there are there better situations to offer the pay discount? If so, which ones, or is it something that should always be considered? I assume we're talking about the prompt pay vendor discounts. I think we... I think you should always consider that. I mean, it... It's, you know, very rarely does the, you know, the amount that... Even if you don't have the cash flow to take the prompt pay discount, it is, you know, almost always gonna be less expensive to maybe dip into your line of credit for a short period of time to take advantage of the prompt pay discount. Is there more forecasting of cash flow on jobs? Not sure I'm following. Is it something about the questions around cash flow, but, cash flow projection. So, yeah, certainly, you know, every, you know, every company kinda has... There are some basic cash flow projection tools built into computers, but each company kinda has their, own secret sauce as far as how they forecast and manage their cash flow. But, certainly, the the data isn't computer you just start with. And then a lot of times, you know, a a a lot of times, the, you know, the the cash flow projection can vary company to company. But, certainly, we have the ability to to help manage the manage the cash flow. Scrolling through the questions here. Here's one I think. This is from an existing ComputeRees customer. Can you explain the importance of job status? So, yeah, in ComputeRees, you have active jobs, inactive jobs, and closed jobs. And, you know, the... I think the importance is, you know, to... You know, closed means we've wrapped everything up, and and and that's going to prevent anyone from billing or charging any cost to the job. Inactive means we're done. Doesn't mean there may not be a straggler invoice, you know, coming in, but it it won't... It will warm but will not prevent us from posting. But, to me, you know, I was... You know, closed was okay. Everything's done. Final retains bill. I'm marking it as closed so I can, one, prevent people from doing anything with that job, posting anything to that job. Two, I can then run reports for just active jobs or inactive jobs or non closed jobs or just closed jobs. So really just a a a way to differentiate those and with closed specifically, a way to prevent people from posting to a job. Got a couple questions here. How can your firm help me? I work, work for mechanical contractors. So, yeah, certainly some... You know, those types of contractors we work with all the time. I see a couple questions around that. We'll certainly be reaching out to anybody who had a question on how we could potentially help them and their company. Got a couple questions here around... You know, we're interested in possibly switching from QuickBooks to Computerease. Can you give us any idea on price and and the time frame that it normally takes to do that? So, yeah, a couple questions we'd wanna ask you. So we will certainly have one of our, one of our consultants reach out and have a conversation with you, and we'll certainly lay out a lay out a plan for you and be able to provide all that information for you. How often do you recommend we put together a WIP schedule? So that's a great question. To me, you know, know, I think if you're putting together WIP schedule any less frequently than monthly, you're not doing it often enough. I think, you know, I certainly have contractors that will put together WIP schedule, you know, weekly or biweekly, but I think at a minimum, you need to be be preparing a WIP schedule on a on a monthly basis and and make sure we're doing it in a timely manner. Not... I don't wanna be halfway to the next month before I prepare the WIP schedule for, you know, the previous month. And, you know, the the WIP schedule in computer is very straightforward. You know, we... You know, the one, you know, the one key variable is the cost to complete. Either percent complete will then calculate the cost to complete for you, or I can tell it the cost to complete. But either way, you know, we're we're looking at, regardless of what the original estimate was, we're always gonna keep that locked in. I wanna see what my projected final cost is going to be and that projected final profitability because that all then ties into the work in progress calculations. Alright. So there's a couple other questions that, once again, will require some follow-up. People... Some people asking about, you know, how we can potentially help them. They wanna talk a little bit more about implementing Computery, so we'll certainly follow-up to anybody that has a question like that. Also, anybody that had a question or had requested to be contacted in the, in the last polling question, we will follow-up as well. But with that, I think we've covered, most of the questions that don't require a one on one follow-up. So once again, I wanna thank everybody for their time today. Please, make sure you watch this back. Visit our Construction Accounting University site to watch not only this, but all the other great content we have related to, related to this series. And, and then we'll look forward to seeing everybody hopefully on the next webinar if, if not before. So thanks all. I appreciate the time, and have a great day.