Your surety asked for a WIP. Now what.
Your surety asked for a WIP schedule and you've never built one. Here's what a WIP is and what they look for. Then here's how to make the first one from QuickBooks without a week of spreadsheets.
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The email from your surety agent
It usually comes as a short note. They need a work in progress schedule with your year end financials, or with the next bond request. You get to $5M or $6M, a bigger job needs a bond, and now you need a document you've never made.
Your bookkeeper might know the term but not the layout. Your CPA might build one once a year at tax time, which isn't what the surety wants. They want to see where each open job is today.
The good news is that a WIP is just a table you can build from numbers you already have. Building the first takes effort. The second takes much less. After that it's a monthly update.
What a WIP schedule is and what the surety looks at
A WIP schedule lists every open job in one row, with contract value, cost to date, estimated cost to complete, percent complete, billed to date and the resulting over or under billing. The total of the rows tells the surety how the whole backlog is doing. One page, one row per job.
They look for a few things. Is the estimated profit on each job holding or shrinking from one schedule to the next? Are you overbilled, which means you've collected cash for work you haven't done yet, or underbilled, which means you've done work you haven't been paid for? And does the schedule tie to your financial statements?
A surety agent wants to see that you know your jobs. A tidy schedule with sensible cost to complete figures, built from the books, builds trust faster than a perfect profit number. Honest and tied out beats pretty.
Build the first one from QuickBooks
Step one is the list of open jobs with contract value, including approved change orders. Pull it from your contracts and from the invoices in QuickBooks Online. Use the current contract amount, not the original.
Step two is cost to date. Pull job cost for each open job through the same date and write the total in the next column. If costs aren't coded to jobs, fix that first, since the WIP can only be as good as the job cost behind it.
Step three is cost to complete. Ask the person in charge of the job how much more it will cost to finish. Don't accept zero or a guess that matches the budget, and include committed costs and any rework you know about.
Step four is the math. Percent complete is cost to date divided by total estimated cost. Earned revenue is percent complete times contract value. Subtract billed to date from earned revenue. A positive number is underbilled and a negative number is overbilled.
Step five is a check. Add up the over and under billing and compare it to the contract assets and liabilities on your balance sheet. If they're far apart, someone has coded costs or billing to the wrong job.
A sense of scale
Your surety will compare you to others your size. The table below holds the published all-trade averages, and net profit is before taxes. It gives you a rough idea of the margins a typical contractor reports, but your trade could be higher or lower.
If your jobs on the WIP show margins well above the averages, be ready to explain why. Agents will ask. A fair answer builds more trust than a low-risk number.
| Revenue | Overhead | Gross margin | Net profit, before taxes |
|---|---|---|---|
| $1M to $5M | 15.1% average 14.1% CFOS target | 22.1% average 25% CFOS target | 7% average 11% CFOS target |
| $5M to $10M | 14.1% average 13.1% CFOS target | 23.4% average 26% CFOS target | 9.4% average 12.9% CFOS target |
Gross margin and overhead come from figures CFMA, Jones Maresca and other sources publish by trade and size. Net profit is computed, not surveyed: net profit = gross margin minus overhead. Nothing comes out for taxes, interest or other income and expense, so it is a before tax figure, on the same basis as CFMA's net income before taxes.
CFMA's 2025 medians are 7.1 percent before interest and taxes and 6.7 percent net income before taxes. Gross margin minus overhead leaves out interest and other income and expense, so a figure here can come in a little above or below a reported net income on the same business.
Above the $10M to $25M band the gross margin and overhead rows are a modeled extension of the same curves. They have not been reconciled against the licensed CFMA Benchmarker, so read those bands as a model and not as a survey result.
How CFOS does it
CFOS for QuickBooks builds the WIP from live job cost. Job cost by cost code updates every hour from QuickBooks Online, the PM enters cost to complete each month, and you approve it. The WIP schedule with over and under billing is built from those approved figures.
There's also a master WIP across all your jobs, so the surety gets one schedule. Each job is a row and the total is at the bottom. Billing comes from your pay apps, including retainage and stored materials, so the billed to date column is the same number you sent to the GC. That helps it tie to your statements.
You still decide the cost to complete, which is what the surety cares about most. CFOS does the arithmetic and keeps last month's figures next to this month's, so you can see how each job moved. That's the trend a surety wants.
This guide is for $5M to $10M companies. At that size one bond request can turn into a request every quarter. A repeatable schedule beats a one time build. So build it once in a way you can update.
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We email you when CFOS for QuickBooks opens, plus a few updates before then. Your address stays with Run On CFOS. One click unsubscribes.
30 days free, a 90-day money-back guarantee, and cancel anytime. It opens January 2027. We email you the day it opens.
What people ask
When does a $6M contractor need a WIP schedule?
Usually when your surety agent asks for one with year end statements or a bond request. Many sureties want it quarterly once your bond program grows. Ask your agent what they need and when.
Who should fill in cost to complete for a $5M company?
The person in charge of the job, whether that's a PM, a superintendent or the owner. The bookkeeper can do the math. They can't know what's left to build.
What does the owner of an $8M sub need to review before it goes to the surety?
Look at the jobs with the biggest change in estimated profit since last time. Then look at the biggest over and under billing. Be ready to explain both in a sentence.
Can my CPA build it instead?
They can, but it's usually once a year from year end data. Your surety wants current numbers. The owner who sees them monthly catches problems sooner.
Does CFOS file anything with the surety for a $9M contractor?
No. It builds the WIP schedule from live job cost and approved cost to complete. You or your CPA decide what goes to the surety. Nothing is sent for you.
- Job costing for contractors doing $1M to $10M a year
- A WIP schedule that builds itself from job cost
- Over and under billing on every job, every month
- Know your costs
- A WIP your surety accepts, every month
- One price. Every module. Priced by your revenue.
- Use all of it, or just the part you need
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