Cash Flow Forecasting & KPI Dashboards

A Cash Flow Forecast Built Around Contractor Timing

The forecast tracks what's actually coming and going: payroll due dates, material payment terms against vendor invoices, expected customer payments against your actual collection history (not just invoice due dates), and retainage releases on commercial jobs. It's updated monthly alongside your close, so you're looking at a forecast grounded in your real numbers, not a generic template.

The goal is simple: you should see a tight month coming weeks in advance, with enough time to adjust — delay a discretionary purchase, follow up on a slow-paying customer, or draw on a line of credit deliberately instead of by surprise.

Gross Margin by Job Type

Once job costing is in place, we track gross margin separately for service work and project work, and by project category if you run more than one (residential, commercial, specialty). This is usually the single number that most changes how contractors bid and prioritize work once they see it broken out instead of blended into one company-wide margin.

Labor Efficiency and Overhead Recovery

Labor efficiency compares billed hours to paid hours across your field crew, surfacing whether your billing rates and crew utilization are actually covering what labor costs you once burden is included. Overhead recovery rate tracks what share of revenue is going to cover rent, insurance, office staff, and other fixed costs — a number that creeps upward quietly if nobody's watching it, and one that directly affects what your bids need to include to stay profitable.

Days to Collect

We track average days to collect across your customer base and flag accounts that are drifting past your terms. This connects directly to the cash flow forecast — a customer sliding from 30 to 60 days doesn't just affect that invoice, it changes your entire near-term cash position, and it's easier to address early than after three months of the same pattern.

Planning Around Seasonality

Electrical contracting is rarely perfectly seasonal the way roofing or landscaping is, but most shops still see real swings — slower residential service call volume in certain months, commercial project timing tied to construction schedules that aren't yours to control, weather delays that push revenue into a later month than planned. The cash flow forecast accounts for your actual historical pattern rather than assuming a flat year, so a predictable slow stretch doesn't get mistaken for a new problem.

Benchmarking Against Your Own History

Rather than compare you to industry-wide averages that may not reflect your market or mix of work, we track your KPIs against your own trailing twelve months. Is gross margin on service work trending up or down quarter over quarter? Is overhead recovery holding steady as revenue grows, or slipping? Your own history, tracked consistently, is usually a more honest benchmark than a generic industry number pulled from a trade association survey.

How the Dashboard Gets Delivered

The KPI dashboard and cash flow forecast are delivered as part of your monthly reporting package alongside your standard financial statements and job profitability report — one place to look, updated on the same schedule, walked through on your monthly call.

Using the Forecast for Bigger Decisions

Beyond day-to-day cash management, the forecast is useful for the bigger calls — whether you can afford to hire another crew ahead of a busy season, whether now's the right time to buy a truck outright versus finance it, or how much cash cushion you actually need before bidding a large commercial job that will tie up material spend for months before it pays. Those decisions are easier to make with a real forecast in front of you than with a gut feeling about how the bank account usually looks.