◆ Steel City CFO · Fractional CFO for the trades · Hamilton, ON
What surety underwriters actually want in a WIP schedule
A one-page checklist for contractors. Your work-in-progress schedule is the single document that sets your bonding capacity. Here's what an underwriter looks for — and the red flags that quietly shrink your bond line.
The 10 things every line needs
- Contract price — original value plus approved change orders, shown separately from pending/unapproved ones.
- Costs incurred to date — all job costs booked to the project, current through the period end.
- Estimated cost to complete — a real, recently-updated number, not a plug. This is where underwriters look hardest.
- Estimated total cost & estimated gross profit — costs to date + cost to complete, and the resulting margin.
- Percent complete — cost-to-cost method (costs to date ÷ estimated total cost), applied consistently.
- Revenue earned to date — % complete × contract price.
- Billings to date — total progress billings issued on the job.
- Over/under billings — billings in excess of costs (overbilled) and costs in excess of billings (underbilled), per job.
- It ties to your financials — total over/under-billings reconcile to the balance sheet; earned revenue matches the income statement.
- Backlog — remaining contract value and the gross profit still to come, so the underwriter sees the forward pipeline.
Red flags that cost you capacity
- Profit fade — estimated gross profit % drifting down job-over-job or period-over-period. The #1 trust-killer.
- WIP that doesn't tie to the financials — if the schedule and the statements disagree, the underwriter trusts neither.
- Stale cost-to-complete — estimates that haven't moved in months read as "we're not tracking this."
- Large underbillings — you're financing the job with your own cash; it signals billing-process or margin problems.
- Missing or completed-not-closed jobs — every open job (and finished-but-open) should be on the schedule.
- Late/manual production — a WIP assembled by hand weeks after period end is hard to rely on and easy to get wrong.
Want this to build itself, every month?
We connect your field software (ServiceTitan, Procore, Jobber) to your books so a clean, tie-out WIP schedule comes straight out of your data — current, consistent, and underwriter-ready — without a full-time CFO.
Book a 30-minute call →