FOR ANYONE WHO BIDS WORK AND WAITS FOR THE CASH · DEALERS · HVAC · SOLAR · RESTAURANT · SURVEY · MODULAR · UPS · MINING TECH
From bid to bank. Where does the cash get stuck?
The quote sat for nine days. Then the PO took six more. Then the install ran a week late. Then you couldn't invoice for ten days because the field paperwork wasn't back. Then the customer paid in 47. That's 72 days of your money funding their job — multiplied by every open quote on the board. This tool finds the stage that's costing you the most working capital, then tells you what unsticking it is worth.
5 Stages
Quote to bank
Cycle Days
End to end
$ Trapped
At each stage
Pipeline
Win-rate × open
YOUR CASH CYCLE
1
Business shape
2
Quote & pipeline
3
The stage times
4
Deposits & terms
5
Results
STAGE 1 OF 5
Business shape
Defaults are typical for a mid-size dealer / contractor selling $40-60K average jobs at a roughly 20-25 quote-per-month run rate.
Free text. Shapes the recommendation narrative — not the math.
Dollar value of a typical job you quote. Use the median of your last 60-90 days. Tiny jobs and one giant outlier should both be excluded.
$
Material + labor margin. Used to value the working-capital cost. HVAC / contractor: 22-32%. Equipment dealer service: 30-45%. Restaurant catering: 35-50%.
%
Quotes / bids / estimates issued in a typical month. Won + lost + still open.
Of quotes issued, the share you eventually close. Healthy: 30-55% in field services; 18-30% in capital equipment.
%
Your real cost of money — line-of-credit rate, factoring fee, or the return you forgo by leaving cash in the business. Default 9% reflects current operating-line pricing.
%
Dollar value of all quotes that are issued and not yet won, lost, or expired. Your live book.
$
What this tool actually measures. Five stages, end to end: quote → PO → install → invoice → cash. We add them up to get your true cash cycle. Then we multiply by job volume to show how many dollars are trapped at each stage on a given Tuesday. The stage with the most days × the most jobs in flight is the one that's funding your customers' working capital, not yours.
STAGE 2 OF 5
Quote & pipeline shape
How big is the book, how often does it turn, and what fraction of issued quotes is just slowly dying on the open list?
How long your quoted price is honored. Standard: 30-45 days for materials-heavy work, 60-90 days for service. Quotes beyond this expire and need re-pricing.
How long after issuing a quote before someone calls / emails to push it. Best-in-class: 3-5 days. Most operators: 14+ or never.
Open quote aging — distribute your pipeline
What share of your open quote dollars is in each age bucket? Should sum to 100%. The bucket with the most dollars over 30 days is your aging problem.
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%
%
%
Quotes past shelf life that are technically still on the board but realistically dead. The honest move is to expire them.
%
STAGE 3 OF 5
The stage times — where does the calendar go?
For a typical won job. Be honest: these are wall-clock days, not "we should be able to" days. Include weekends.
From the day you hand over the quote to the day a signed PO / contract / authorization comes back. The customer's procurement / decision time.
From PO to boots-on-the-job. Includes scheduling, material lead times, permitting, equipment availability. Often the biggest hidden chunk.
Time on site, from mobilization to substantial completion. Use working days.
From job complete to invoice out the door. Field paperwork, supervisor sign-off, billing-team queue. Best-in-class: same day. Most: 8-15.
Customer payment time. Your DSO. Net-30 customers actually pay in 38-52. Public-sector / GC: 60-75.
Common in construction. 5-10% held until punch-list complete, then 30-90 more days. Set to 0 if not applicable.
%
The honest test. Pick a job that closed last month. Walk through the calendar with the project manager and the AR clerk. The number you arrive at is almost always 30-50% higher than the field's mental model — because the lag between "the job is done" and "the invoice went out" is invisible unless you measure it.
STAGE 4 OF 5
Deposits & payment terms
A 30% deposit on signature collapses the working-capital curve dramatically — but most operators leave it on the table because "nobody asks for it." Try it on. The math is unforgiving.
Cash collected up front when the customer signs. Standard in custom build, A/V install, modular delivery. Underused everywhere else.
%
For longer jobs, milestone billing during the work — at mobilization, 50%, substantial completion. Set to 0 for one-invoice-at-end model.
%
What your invoice says. Net 30 is standard. Net 15 with 2/10 discount can pull 8-12 days off DSO.
If you offer 2/10 net 30, how many take it? If you don't offer one, leave at 0.
%
Most operators bill weekly or monthly. Monthly billing adds an average of 15 days to the cycle for free.
ACH or credit-card on file pulling automatically at terms. Pulls 5-12 days off DSO when adopted.
STAGE 5 OF 5
Results — where the cash is stuck
Total cycle days, dollars trapped at each stage, the working-capital cost on those trapped dollars, and the recommendation cards.
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Headline metrics
The 5-stage cycle
Each cell is one stage of your cash cycle. Days = wall-clock days a typical job sits in that stage. $ trapped = the dollar value of jobs in that stage on a given Tuesday, given your run rate. Red = the longest stage (the choke point). Green = the shortest.
Working capital trapped — by stage
Open-quote aging
Recommendations
PAIRS WITH
CFO & Controller's Guide + Business Operators Blueprint
The CFO Guide covers the AR / DSO / cash-conversion-cycle discipline at the controller level — collection scripts, lockbox setup, factoring vs. lines, the weekly cash call. The Business Operators Blueprint covers the field-side counterparts: quote follow-up cadence, deposit-at-signature scripts that don't kill close rate, and the invoice-the-day-the-job-closes operating rhythm. Together they're the working-capital chapter. Read the CFO & Controller's Guide →
HERE, TRY THESE. THEY MAY HELP.
Quote-to-cash is one node in a bigger operating system.
The full operating-economics stack lives in two practitioner guides and roughly 70 free tools. Read the guides when you have an hour. Run the tools when you have a question. No forms, no gates, no follow-up calls. Just the work.
Not financial / accounting advice. Operating economics vary by industry, region, contract structure, and customer mix. Use these as decision-support frameworks, not as substitutes for your CFO, controller, or operating partner's judgment.
WANT THE METHODOLOGY BEHIND THIS TOOL?
Read more in the CFO Guide.
The tool gives you the answer. The guide gives you the argument — the case law, the worked examples, the negotiation playbook, the cross-check tables, the exception cases.
The methodology behind this calculator is in CFO Guide + Business Operators Blueprint of the reference guide.