The Draw Schedule That Keeps Cash Moving

The job is going fine. The money isn't.

Rough-in passed three weeks ago. You already paid for the copper, the fixtures are in your garage, and your helper has cashed two weeks of checks. The only invoice on this job is the one you'll send when it's done, another month out. So for six weeks, you are the bank.

That's not a slow-paying customer. That's a billing structure, and you control it.

The number worth knowing

Siteline's State of Subcontractor Billing in 2025, published August 12, 2025, put the average wait at 96 days from work performed to money received, up from 90 days in 2019. Only five percent of subcontractors say they consistently get paid on time.

The instinct is to blame the GC, and sometimes that's fair. But the 96 days starts before the GC ever sees a pay app. It starts with how the job was written.

One invoice at the end means you finance the job

If the agreement says the customer pays when the work is done, you've agreed to lend them your materials, your labor, and your time, interest-free, for the length of the project. Nobody writes that deal on purpose. Most of us write it by default, because one invoice at the end is simpler to think about.

A draw schedule breaks the total into payments tied to points in the job. Deposit at mobilization. A draw when rough-in passes. Another at trim. Final at completion. The customer knows the schedule before they sign, and you get paid as you go instead of after. GCs have billed this way forever. What's new is that a one-truck shop can run it without a bookkeeper.

Tie draws to events, not dates or feelings

This is what decides whether the schedule actually works.

A draw tied to a date invites a conversation about whether you're on schedule. A draw tied to percent complete invites a conversation about whether you're really 60 percent done. Both are arguments you can lose while holding a correct invoice.

A draw tied to a verifiable event ends the conversation before it starts:

• Underground rough-in signed off
• Top-out inspection cleared
• Fixtures set and water on
• Certificate of occupancy issued

Nobody argues about whether the inspection passed. There's a document, and the inspector's name is on it. Where your trade has no inspection to hang a draw on, use an install anyone standing in the room can see. "Water heater set and running" is a fact. "Substantially complete" is a negotiation.

Front-load the material money

The first draw isn't a favor to you. Its job is to keep you from buying someone else's materials with your own cash.

Add up what you spend before you see a dollar — the unit, the fittings, the permit, the dumpster — and make sure the mobilization draw covers it with room to spare. On a $10,000 repipe with $2,600 in materials, a 30 percent deposit puts you $400 ahead instead of $2,600 behind. Same job, same total, same customer. The only difference is the order the money moves.

Run that on your last big job: the total, what you spent in week one, and the days between. That gap is what you financed.

It only collects if it was in writing first

A draw schedule you mention verbally is a preference. One printed on the proposal the customer signed is a term.

Put the whole thing on the estimate before work starts: each phase, its amount, and which one is due on acceptance. Then when a phase closes, you're not asking a favor or hinting. You're pointing at a document they already agreed to. Two completely different phone calls:

"Hey, just following up on that invoice, any word on it?"

"Rough-in passed Tuesday. Per the schedule you signed, that's the 40 percent draw. Invoice is in your inbox."

The second one gets paid, and it doesn't cost you the relationship, because nothing about it is a surprise.

Bill the day the phase closes

Here's the leak almost everyone has, even with a schedule in place.

The inspection passes Tuesday. You're busy, so you write the invoice Sunday night with the rest of the week's paperwork. If that customer runs a Monday cutoff and pays on Fridays, your own five-day delay just cost you a full pay cycle. They didn't pay slow. You billed slow.

Every day between phase completion and invoice date is float you hand over for free. Two habits that protect it:

• Don't start the next phase on an unpaid draw. Each phase is supposed to fund the next. Start phase three with draw two outstanding and you've quietly gone back to financing the job. "We're ready to start trim as soon as the rough-in draw clears" is a normal, professional sentence.
• Paper the change orders. Mid-job additions are where margin disappears. The second vanity gets its own written amount and approval before it gets installed. "We'll settle up at the end" is how a $900 add becomes an argument in month three.

What this actually takes

None of it requires software: a schedule written before the job starts, triggers that are facts instead of opinions, and invoicing the day a phase closes.

The discipline is the hard part, because it lands on the person also doing the work. The invoice is due the moment you're dirtiest and furthest from a laptop.

That's the gap we built the milestone billing in Right Hand to close. The schedule prints on the proposal the customer signs, so the terms exist before anyone breaks ground, and the first draw invoices itself when they accept. After that you text that a phase is done — "framing passed" — it reads the draw and amount back for a one-tap confirmation, and the invoice goes out citing the signed schedule with the payment link attached, while you're still on the job. If an earlier draw is unpaid, it tells you before you send the next one. I run a licensed remodeling company in San Diego, and the version I used before was a note on my phone and a Sunday night I'd rather have back.

Pick your next job over $5,000 and write the schedule before you price it. Three draws is enough to start: mobilization, the inspection in the middle, completion. Send that middle invoice the day the inspection passes and watch how much earlier the check shows up.