AP & AR Management for Construction Companies
In construction, the job can be finished, gorgeous, and fully signed off — and you're still not paid, because someone forgot to bill the retainage and the lien deadline quietly walked past. Let's not do that.
Your money is stuck in the middle of the process
Construction cash flow is a slow-motion obstacle course. You buy materials and make payroll now; you bill in draws and get paid in 30, 60, sometimes 90 days; and a chunk of every job sits as retainage nobody releases until the very end. Miss a billing milestone or a lien deadline and that money doesn't get late — it gets gone.
Meanwhile your payables have their own rules: pay the suppliers who keep your jobs moving, track what's tied to which project, and keep lien waivers straight so you're not paying twice or exposed to a sub's unpaid bill. It's a lot of moving parts, and "we'll catch up on billing this weekend" is how six figures ends up parked in accounts receivable.
On-time billing is the cheapest financing there is
The fastest way to fix construction cash flow usually isn't a loan — it's billing on the day the draw is due instead of whenever someone gets to it, and chasing the receivable before it ages into a fight. Getting paid two weeks sooner across every open job is a bigger swing than most owners expect, and it costs you nothing but discipline.
On the payables side, the win is control: knowing what you owe, to whom, tied to which job, so you pay strategically instead of paying whoever emails the loudest.
How Kaizen runs it
We run your payables and receivables end-to-end on a modern stack — QuickBooks Online with Ramp for spend — with a documented weekly rhythm. Bills get captured, coded to the job, and queued for your approval; invoices and draws go out on schedule; retainage gets tracked so it's actually billed when it releases; and receivables get followed up before they go quiet.
You still approve every payment. We just make sure nothing falls through the cracks between the field and the office, which is exactly where construction money likes to disappear.
What's included
- Bills captured, coded to the job/cost code, and queued for your approval
- Progress billing and draw schedules sent on time, every cycle
- Retainage tracked and billed when it releases — not forgotten
- AR follow-up before receivables age into a collection problem
- Lien-waiver tracking and vendor payment records kept straight
- Job-level payables visibility so you pay strategically, not reactively
- Vendor ledger cleanup — no duplicate suppliers, no double payments
- Weekly cash position: what's coming in, what's going out, what's stuck
Pricing
Straight answers
Do you handle retainage and progress billing specifically?
Yes — those are the two places construction AR leaks most. We schedule the draws, track retainage per job so it gets billed when it releases, and follow up on the receivable instead of assuming the GC will remember.
Will you pay bills without our approval?
Never. We capture, code to the job, and queue everything for you. You approve; we execute. The point is to remove the busywork and the missed deadlines, not the control.
Can you tie payables to specific jobs?
That's the whole idea. Every bill gets coded to a job and cost code, so you can see committed costs per project and pay strategically. It also makes job-costing and WIP reporting actually possible.
We do our own billing now. Why change?
If your invoices genuinely go out the day they're due and your AR never ages, don't change a thing. If billing is the task that slips when the field gets busy — which is most contractors — that slip is costing you more than we do.
Related
Free 20-minute books assessment
We'll show you the five things we'd fix first in your books — useful whether you hire us, hire someone, or do neither.
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